GUATEMALA: GENOCIDE PLAINTIFFS TESTIFY

by Thaddeus al Nakba, Upside Down World

Guatemala has received much attention over recent violence and the impunity enjoyed by its perpetrators. Some organizations state that almost 15 people are murdered daily in Guatemala, mostly in the capital. These numbers are often compared to the levels of violence during the 36-year civil war in Guatemala (1961–1996). However, what many analysts forget to mention is that during the nearly four decades of internal armed conflict, the vast majority of the violence occurred under the brutal dictatorships of Efraín Ríos Montt and Romeo Lucas Garcia (1980–1983). These four years saw a military campaign of genocide perpetrated against the indigenous Maya populations. To compare the present with this past is unfair to the victims and survivors of the genocide. Thus far, only one perpetrator has been successfully prosecuted. The current situation of impunity has roots in the violence of the past. Guatemala will never be able to solve problems of the present without first addressing the violence of the past.

Judge Opens Suspended Court Case for Río Negro Massacre

What crime did the women and children commit? – Juan, 25 March 2008

On December 19, 2007, a landmark legal trial commenced in Salamá, Baja Verapaz, when a local judge announced the continuation of a case suspended since October of 2004, charging six former members of the Xococ Civil Defense Patrol (PAC) with murder for their roles in the March 13, 1982 massacre of 177 women and children from Río Negro. The six accused are being charged by the Guatemalan state-appointed public prosecutor (Ministerio Publico) and by a local war survivors’ organization, the Association for the Integral Development of the Victims of the Violence Maya Achí (ADIVIMA).

Previously, in the same court case, three leaders of the Xococ PAC were sentenced to death in October 1999, later commuted to 50 years imprisonment, for their roles in the massacre. It has marked the only time in which Guatemalan military or paramilitary men responsible for the violence during the scorched-earth campaigns under dictators Romeo Lucas Garcia and Efraín Ríos Montt have been convicted in a court of law. This despite the hundreds of massacres committed and tens of thousands of innocent indigenous people murdered during the regimes.

Since the reopening of the court case, the six accused have given their declarations and have been cross-examined by the prosecution and defense. According to ADIVIMA’s lawyer, Edgar Peréz, the accused attempted to paint a picture of their subordination to the Army and Commander [José Antonio] Solares. Essentially, they said in their declarations that they only followed orders. Some even claimed they never arrived in Río Negro, despite witness testimonies negating this claim.

Río Negro be Dammed
The majority of the witnesses in the Río Negro massacre currently call Pacux “home.” Pacux is a “model village” (also called “strategic hamlet” and “pole of development”) set up by the Guatemalan army and the National Institute of Electricity (INDE) for the residents transplanted by the large reservoir created by the mega-project known as the Chixoy Hydroelectric Dam. The state never truly consulted the 23 affected communities throughout the planning and development stages, despite embarking on the project as early as 1975. It certainly never asked for their permission.

Through the influence of INDE, army incursions began almost immediately in communities to be affected by the mega-project. Supporters expected to profit immediately from the endeavor. The goal was simple: Get the people out as quickly as possible. The first massacre in Río Negro occurred as early as March 4, 1980, when a military policeman acting as a security guard for the dam opened fire on a crowd of campesinos protesting his presence in the region. Seven protestors were killed. The INDE security guard was lynched.

Army and state violence and terror only increased in the aftermath, especially against leaders of campesino organizations opposed to the project. The military often used the excuse of looking for the lynched soldier’s weapons when they raided houses and kidnapped outspoken residents, who were later found dead or remained missing. In fact, four months after the massacre, two leaders of the community, Evaristo Osorio and Valeriano Osorio Chen, went missing as they headed for a meeting in the capital with INDE officials. With them they carried their only copies of official documents of the promised compensation by INDE for the residents. They had previously handed over the property titles of the residents to INDE officials. Their bodies were found later with evidence of torture. The documents were stolen and INDE denied ever receiving the land titles.

The Guatemalan army and INDE labeled the rural Maya Achí people of Río Negro “subversives” and “guerillas” due to their refusal to be forcefully relocated for the dam. Río Negro residents quickly learned that not only would INDE and the Army not respect their civil rights; any democratic resistance to their displacement would only be met with terror and violence.

Most Río Negro residents attempted to avoid the increasing state terror by fleeing their ancestral homeland to other regions. This usually entailed resettlement to Pacux, with its cramped houses and poor, arid land provided by INDE in its “agreement” with the people. But when the residents saw the true conditions of life in Pacux, combined with INDE’s refusal to meet its part in the compensatory agreement with the affected residents, resistance only continued.

The state responded with four massacres in an eight-month period in 1982, which killed at least 440 Río Negro residents, the vast majority of the population (Historical Clarification Commission-CEH. Annex I: Book I. Illustrative Case No. 10: “Massacre and Elimination of the Community of Río Negro”).

When all residents were either dead, hiding in the mountains, or resettled in the military colony of Pacux, the construction of the hydroelectric dam began as planned, with the financial support and tacit approval of the “international community.” Throughout the violence directed at the Maya Achí population in Río Negro, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank continued financing the Chixoy Hydroelectric Dam until as late as 1985.

Scorched Earth and Genocide
The state violence directed at the Maya Achí people of Río Negro, Rabinal, Baja Verapaz was not an isolated policy in the region. The Guatemalan Foundation of Forensic Anthropology (FAFG) estimated that between September of 1981 and August of 1983 there were 5,000 extra-judicial assassinations by the Guatemalan military and its death squads out of 22,753 registered people living in the Rabinal municipality. Of the over one-fifth of the population murdered in the 28 massacres in Rabinal, it is estimated by the UN-sponsored truth commission, la Comisión de Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH), that 99.8% were indigenous Maya Achí.

On a national level, the State campaigns were also directed almost exclusively at the indigenous Maya populations of the Guatemalan highlands during the scorched-earth campaigns of the early 1980s under dictators Montt and Garcia. The CEH revealed that the majority of the 626 massacres committed in rural Mayan villages during the 36-year internal armed conflict were executed under these two brutal military regimes.

According to the CEH, some of the alarming results of the 36-year civil war included: 150,000 refugees in Mexico; 1.5 million internally displaced; 50,000 disappeared; and over 200,000 killed. Of the over 200,000 civilian murders, the CEH estimated that 132,000 were committed under the scorched-earth campaigns of Garcia and Montt. In their 1999 report, “Guatemalan Memory of Silence,” the CEH placed 93% of the blame in the hands of the Guatemalan army and its death squads and declared the state-sponsored violence against the indigenous Maya people to be “genocide.”

March 13, 1982: Desert March to Pacoxom
One of the most horrific consequences of the state violence against indigenous Mayan peoples occurred on March 13, 1982 in Río Negro. According to witnesses, at around 6 AM no less than 10 Guatemalan army soldiers, accompanied by 50 Xococ civil patrollers and military commissioners, invaded the small fishing and farming village of Río Negro. The battalion entered residents’ homes, carrying an array of weapons, including Israeli Galil assault rifles.

Once inside the homes, the armed militia demanded to know where the men were hiding and the guns stashed. There were no men in Río Negro that day. The patrollers tied up the women and beat them when they replied that the men had previously been killed in the February 13 massacre of 74 people attempting to collect their confiscated identification documents in Xococ. Some of the soldiers and patrollers raped the younger women inside their own homes while others dragged the residents out of their houses and led them to a local school, promising them a party.

Once the residents were forcefully gathered at the school, soldiers and patrollers led some of the women and children to nearby abandoned houses and gang-raped them. The patrollers and soldiers especially targeted young girls who had not yet given birth since they were considered “pure.” They also specifically targeted pregnant mothers and small children, especially if they complained of hunger, thirst, or exhaustion. The armed men had previously ransacked the houses and taken the residents’ food.

Many of the hostages and their captors waited at the school while the last of the residents were rounded up. When everyone was captured, the troops led them to a trail headed towards a mountaintop known by locals as Pacoxom. On the trail, some of the captives rested at a large nance tree, where one of the first recorded murders took place. Two Army soldiers brutally assaulted 94-year-old Andrés Iboy Uscap. They kicked him in the chest, wrapped him in a costal (coffee sack), and threw him into a deep ravine. According to witness testimonies, after the murder of Iboy, most captives understood their fate.

After their brief stay, the women and children continued walking along the path in a column heavily guarded in front and back by soldiers and patrollers. Most of the Río Negro residents were forced to walk to a large conacaste tree, about one mile from the school. While waiting at the tree for the arrival of the rest of the battalion, the armed squadron took out a stolen cassette player and played marimba music. According to one witness, the soldiers forced the women to dance, saying: “Now you are going to dance, like you have danced for the guerrillas.” The soldiers and patrollers next grabbed young girls out of the group and raped them.

Throughout the entire two-mile hike along the path to Pacoxom, under the sweltering sun with no shade, the hostages continually asked for water and food. The armed men responded by beating and whipping the women and children with sticks and ropes. Some of the hostages were tied up and mocked for their misery during the hike. Some of the raped girls were forced to walk naked. Witnesses spoke of both internal and external scars from the physical and emotional abuse directed at them by the patrollers, including the six men now accused of the crime. According to one testimony recorded by the CEH, “the majority of the women were naked, raped, and there were women who were only days away from giving birth, but these babies were born purely from blows.” (CEH, Book III, p. 31).

March 13, 1982: Massacre at Pacoxom
When the captives finally reached the mountaintop of Pacoxom in the scorching sun of the early afternoon, there was no food or water to be found—at least for the suffering Río Negro residents. Instead, soldiers dynamited and forced the women to dig into the rocky soil with pickaxes, creating a large hole centered in the small ravine. When the armed battalion was satisfied with its size, they turned their energy towards the defenseless civilians.

Army soldiers and Xococ patrollers separated the women into two groups. One group was organized into mothers and their young children; the other into older girls and young women not carrying babies. To ensure no one would escape, the perimeter was well guarded and many hostages tied up.

After insulting and torturing the civilians with clubs and whips made of tree branches and rope, the massacre began. All of the Río Negro residents were made to lie down on the ground, faced down, so that they could not witness the atrocities taking place around them. The men took women and girls out of the groups, usually four at a time, and brutally raped them, sometimes torturing and beating them unconscious if they weren’t deemed virgins. Afterwards they were slain.

The mass execution lasted hours. As it continued, the aggressors didn’t bother hiding the slaughter and permitted the children to watch their sisters and mothers raped and murdered. Throughout the massacre, the valley below echoed with the shouts, cries, and pleas of the women and children being insulted, tortured, raped, and murdered by their executioners. Witnesses hiding in the mountains verified this at the trial.

One witness, Jesús Tecu, described how one of the PAC leaders, the convicted Pedro Gonzalez Gómez, wanted to kill a young mother, Vicenta Iboy Chen, and became enraged when she tried to protect herself by throwing a rock in his direction. According to Tecu, Gonzalez took out his machete “and gave her two swings to her back” where she carried her baby. “Half fell to the ground, with the other half still wrapped around the back of its mother.” Vicenta fell to the ground where he “gave her two more machete blows to the neck.”

In February of 2008, Tecu also described the actions of another patroller, the accused Pablo Ruiz Alvarado:

He had one woman, Tomasa, faced down, with the rope fastened around her neck in the form of a tourniquet… but she didn’t die and her body quivered. So he killed her and continued beating her with a garrote, like she was a savage animal… Then he took her by the feet and dragged her to the ravine…

One of the other accused, the PAC leader Francisco Alvarado Lajuj, earned the nickname “don Quebrado” (the Severer) for his viciousness in killing innocent women and children in Río Negro. Their methods were so brutal that rumors circulated around the region that the Xococ patrollers licked the blood of their victims from their machetes.

Through witness testimonies and forensic evidence gathered at the Pacoxom exhumation, the variety of murder methods during the large-scale massacre has been well documented. Most of the young women and girls were killed by strangulation with rope and garrotes, by decapitation with machete blades, by blows to the head with sticks and clubs, or by bullets to the head with firearms. According to witnesses and forensic anthropologists at the trial, almost all of the young children were hung, beaten, bludgeoned by machete, shot, or had their feet tied together and were flung against jagged rocks and tree stumps.

After the executions, the bodies were thrown down a small ravine. According to some of the younger witnesses, a number of the victims were still alive, gargling blood and quivering when they landed on top of other bodies in the makeshift grave. The ravine was filled with bodies of the women and children by 5 pm. According to witnesses who arrived in the aftermath while hiding in the mountains, the dogs ate many of the remains before they could be covered with dirt.

At least three people escaped the butchery after their capture. Bruna left her 4-month-old baby, Jesusa, near her mother and successfully evaded her captors by running from the shots fired by the Army and the PAC. She hid for months in the forest. On March 5, 2008, she described her interaction with her mother and her thoughts of her fateful decision to flee:

[I said] “Mama. How it hurts, mama, what they are doing… Mama, I don’t want to die like this. I´m going to flee…” So I asked my mom to stay with my baby, but she didn’t want to receive her. I dropped her on the ground because she wouldn’t take her… And I fled… I still think of my girl, but I didn’t want to die…

Slavery in Xococ
After the mass execution, the Xococ patrollers carried 18 children as “virtual slaves” to their homes in Xococ. Some of the captives were as young as four years old. Many of the young children who were carried to Xococ survived because their mothers influenced their executioners to carry their sons and daughters away in order to raise them as their own. Most of the patrollers obliged, but only after executing the youngsters’ mothers in front of their eyes. One witness, José, recalls one terrible incident during his March 6 testimony:

My mom was already dead. So I began walking towards Río Negro, but was intercepted by a patroller… There was still the screaming of women and children and gunshots of the patrollers and soldiers… At 5:00 everything went silent. Everyone [from the PAC] selected their kid to carry to their houses, but one child was not elected… Jesús tried to bring his little brother [Jaime] but a patroller [Pedro Gonzalez Gomez] grabbed him out of his arms and tied a rope around his neck and carried him like that. He then threw him in the ravine against the rocks.

Along the path to Xococ, the children heard PAC members openly bragging about how many women and children they had killed. Meanwhile, the young captives remembered how they were hungry, thirsty, and tired during their forced trek. The young hostages recalled in detail how they did not eat until they arrived early the next morning in Xococ. According to the witnesses there was a meal prepared for all of the combatants, including Commander Solares, at the Catholic Church in Xococ, site of the February 13 massacre.

Adjusting to life in Xococ was extremely difficult for the young children of Río Negro. The kidnapped children were dispersed throughout the village, often living with the murderers of their family members. The children were depressed and had difficulties eating and sleeping due to their trauma. The Xococ patrollers arbitrarily changed many of their names and often instructed them to call them “mom” and “dad.” They weren’t allowed to go to school, and even the youngest were forced to labor in the fields or the house like adults. The Xococ families treated the children cruelly, beating and torturing them at a moments notice. One witness even showed his scars to prove the torture he endured.

While living with their “new” families in Xococ, Río Negro witnesses recalled how the accused and other Xococ patrollers returned to Río Negro shortly after the massacre to carry off “war booty,” such as animals, personal possessions, and other things of value. The Xococ PAC members often sold the animals or clothing in nearby markets or gave some of the goods to the military leaders in the Rabinal military detachment. One witness told the court how she was beaten in her Xococ home when she started to cry after seeing her murdered family members’ clothing being carried off to nearby markets.

Younger witnesses remembered how the men often had their wives pack food for them in the early morning so that they could go on “trips.” Witnesses remembered the men leaving for such “trips” on the morning of May 14 and September 14, the days of the massacres in nearby Los Encuentros and Agua Fría, where many refugees from Río Negro had fled.

When the men returned from their “trips” they often held meetings in their homes where the Río Negro children lived. Witnesses remember the men congratulating one another on their missions and then communicating with the military commissioners and local army commanders. One witnesses recalled being saddened after one of the accused bragged about decimating the community of Agua Fría. The witness had family members who had taken refuge there. At least 92 civilians were burned in their houses or shot on September 14 in Agua Fría, while on the same day, in the community of Los Encuentros, 79 people were murdered with guns and grenades and dozens more carried away in an army helicopter never to be seen again. Most of the victims were Río Negro residents attempting to escape the violence.

Many witnesses choked down tears as they described their time in Xococ as an absolute nightmare. Many lived for up to four years as virtual slaves in Xococ before being rescued by real family members living in the military colony of Pacux.

Justice?
In 1999, the UN-sponsored truth commission, la Comisión de Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH), declared that the five massacres of Río Negro residents and the extrajudicial and arbitrary assassinations of residents following the massacres demonstrated the cruel intention of the Guatemalan army to displace or obliterate the community of Río Negro. It further stated that the state’s intention to fully or partially destroy the residents and community of Río Negro was genocide, under Article II of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CEH 1999: Conclusions, Chapter II: pp. 108-123).

The real architects of the repression, the assassinations, the violence, and the massacres of Río Negro and of other indigenous communities have not been charged with any crime. None of the military officials who planned, ordered, or participated in the massacres of Río Negro have had to face any court of law. Captain Solares and his commanders have not been arrested, despite a warrant issued in April of 2003. According to ADIVIMA, Solares continues to collect his pension check from the Guatemalan military at his house outside of Salamá, Baja Verapaz.

Neither Romeo Lucas Garcia nor Efraín Rios Montt, the architects of the scorched-earth campaigns during the early 1980s that resulted in hundreds of massacres of indigenous Maya communities similar to what took place in Río Negro, have had to give declarations in a court of law, despite two genocide cases against their high commands.

The Guatemalan state has thus far ignored its own culpability and responsibility in the massacres of Río Negro. The state-owned energy company, INDE, responsible for implementing the resettlement of affected residents and of other compensatory agreements, never fulfilled its promises after the written contract and land titles were conveniently stolen from the community during the violence. INDE, since privatized, has essentially ignored its commitment to the people.

Neither the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, nor the dozens of international governments on the boards that approved financing the mega-project, have had to pay any compensation or face any charges for their complicity in the massacre of innocents.

That’s not to say no justice has been served. Eight indigenous Maya Achí men (the convicted Carlos Chen López died of diabetes), perpetrators of one of the worst massacres during the scorched-earth campaigns of dictators Montt and Garcia, live in their Guatemalan prison cells.

However, the real leaders of the massacre and other massacres throughout the country enjoy the comfort of Guatemalan impunity. Many of the Río Negro victims believe this is because they aren’t indigenous Maya. Jesús Tecu declared in his closing statement on February 19 in the current legal trial: “There is only justice carried out against the indigenous people accused… [F]or those who are the material authors of these crimes, there’s nothing.”

Some of the names of the witnesses were changed due to reasons of security. The testimonies were translated and transcribed to the best of the author’s abilities.

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Thaddeus al Nakba is an international human rights accompanier for the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala (NISGUA).This article is dedicated to the Río Negro victims and their families, including little Jesusa.

This story first appeared May 7 on Upside Down World.

From our daily report:

Guatemala: convictions in Río Negro massacre
WW4 Report, June 1, 2008
/node/5578

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, June 1, 2008
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingGUATEMALA: GENOCIDE PLAINTIFFS TESTIFY 

BOLIVIA AFTER THE WATER WARS

Struggle for a “Social-Public” Sector

by Susan Spronk, Upside Down World

In the month of February, an unusual plight fell upon the city of La Paz. Torrential rains that hit the region ruptured the water main that services the wealthiest zone of the city, leaving the residents of the Zona Sur without water for several days. While it is common for residents in poor barrios not to have access to piped water, upper and middle class residents are accustomed to hearing the gush of clean, running water every time they open the tap. Seeking someone to blame, gold-ringed fingers pointed immediately to the “incompetent” management of the public water company, resurrecting debates about privatization put temporarily to rest by the “Water Wars” of 2000 and 2005.

Bolivia has played a starring role in the history of neoliberal water privatization. Images from the Cochabamba Water War—the popular insurrection against the multinational water company run by American construction giant Bechtel in April 2000—have been beamed into screens and television sets across the planet. The defeat of Bechtel is widely credited as the first great victory against corporate globalization in Latin America. The demand for public water that emerged in the Cochabamba Valley eventually diffused to El Alto, the poor city neighboring La Paz, where a three-day civil strike organized by local neighborhood organizations in January 2005 forced then-President Carlos Mesa to cancel the contract with French multinational, Suez. Because of these struggles, the world has also looked to Bolivia for alternatives to privatization.

Eight years after Bolivia’s first Water War, however, the unsatisfactory performance of the two water companies that were returned to public control raises questions about the viability of the public-state alternative in “weak” states of the global South.

Moving beyond the Privatization Debate
In the 1990s, two opposing positions on the question of private sector participation emerged within the literature on the water sector: those who embraced private sector participation and those who defended state forms of ownership and control. The trouble with this debate is that it presents “public” (read: state) and “private” forms of provision as polar opposites. In Bolivia, water justice activists have articulated a third position which suggests that the “public”/”private” debate misses the point. According to this view, the barriers that impede access of the poor to water services—poverty and political powerlessness—are likely to persist whether the water company is publicly or privately owned. It is therefore not enough to simply return water to public hands.

Given the poor performance of many public water companies, water justice activists in Bolivia stress the importance of collective ownership and popular democracy as the means by which to improve utilities. As Oscar Olivera, one of the spokespersons from the Bolivian water justice movement argues, “the true opposite of privatization is the social re-appropriation of wealth by working-class society itself—self-organized in communal structures of management, in neighborhood associations, in unions, and in the rank and file.”

As of yet, however, the water justice movement in Bolivia has come short of achieving its goals of democratizing the water companies based upon this notion of communal ownership and control. Indeed, the struggle for “social control” within the renationalized water utilities in La Paz-El Alto and Cochabamba have provoked the negative reactions of key power holders in the local political economy, including international financial institutions, and the municipal and central governments that have impeded progress.

The New Water Company in La Paz-El Alto
While the government promised to cancel the privatization contract in the neighboring cities of La Paz and El Alto in January 2005, it took over two years for the government to follow through. The key stumbling block was the government’s fear that Suez, the French multinational that controlled the private consortia, would retaliate with a multi-million dollar lawsuit in an international investment court, similar to the one launched by Bechtel in 2002. After two years of closed-door negotiations, the government gave Suez a golden handshake and formed a temporary water company, called “EPSAS”, to take its place.

In the sweetheart deal signed in January 2007, the Bolivian state paid Suez and other shareholders US$5.5 million to compensate them for their lost investments. The government also assumed at least US$9.5 million of company debts owed to agencies such as the International Financial Corporation (the private sector lending arm of the World Bank), the Inter-American Development Bank and the Andean Development Corporation. Half of the company’s income now goes to paying debt, which has seriously impeded the cash flow.

Hence, the company had difficulty coming up with the money to make emergency reparations to solve the water problems of the Zona Sur in February. In short, having already sucked the company dry, Suez has no need to go to launch a lawsuit in international court: It has already been compensated for financial “damages” despite the fact that it made at least US$1.5 million per year during the course of the contract, plus being paid another $1 million “management fee” by the local consortium.

The EPSAS is intended to be a transitory company, but the deadline by which time it was to be replaced passed some months ago. The government struck an inter-institutional commission, which includes participation by FEJUVEs (Federation of Neighborhood Councils) in La Paz and El Alto, the two mayors, and representatives from the Water Ministry, to evaluate proposals for a new water company. As time has passed, the FEJUVE-El Alto, which was once the most militant member of the commission, has lost much of its steam.

Shortly after the water war, the FEJUVE-El Alto proposed a model for a “public-social company” with a very high level of popular participation, including a popular assembly with elected delegates from all regions of the city which would formulate the policy of the water company. Facing pressure from the mayors of La Paz and El Alto and international donor agencies—all of whom favor the formation of a public-private partnership—the proposal has slowly transformed into a “light” version with a minimal level of public participation. According to Felipe Quispe (no relation to the Aymara leader, “el Mallku”), the representative of the FEJUVE-El Alto on the commission, the FEJUVE-El Alto now has a rather minimal demand: that one representative from each neighborhood organization is included on the board of directors of the new water company.

While political pressure from politicians and donor agencies is partly to blame for the FEJUVE’s decision to water down the proposal, it is also the result of internal strife that has considerably weakened the organization’s capacity for collective action since the election of the left-of-center Movement toward Socialism (the MAS) in December 2005. As a long-time observer of Bolivia social movements, Raquel Gutiérrez observed in a recent interview that social movements in Latin American countries in which left governments like the MAS have been elected are “in a bit of a gray moment.” She provides two reasons for the uncertainty which prevails amongst community leaders: “One, the governments in power and the policies that they are implementing are perceived by practically everyone as insufficient. Two, the movement’s struggles, and the emergence of what seemed like a new form of politics, of direct participation, of assembly, of a horizontal process of gaining consensus via extensive, multi-level deliberation, of virtually holding our own destiny in our hands, hit a wall.”

The politics of cooptation related to hierarchical political structures have also affected the FEJUVE-El Alto. The MAS appointed Abel Mamani as the head of the newly created Water Ministry in January 2006. Upon his appointment, Manami was immediately criticized for using the organization as a launch pad for his own political ambitions and turning his back on the social movements responsible for his fame. Carlos Rojas, who served on the same FEJUVE executive as Abel Mamani (2004-2006), comments that the legal status of the new “public” company is ambiguous: “Aguas del Illimani [the private consortia controlled by Suez] never really left. The new water company has the same administrative structure as the private company: It employs the same people; it is registered under the same number; it has the same bank account as the old company.”

Indeed, the EPSAS is a sociedad anónima (equivalent to a “limited” company in English). As such, it is not wholly “public”: EPSAS has two private shareholders and it is regulated by commercial instead of public law. Disconcertingly, the cost of a potable water connection has gone up from $155 to $175 under the new administration.

When I asked why the FEJUVE-El Alto has not kicked up much fuss about the fee hike, Rojas explained that the government has effectively neutralized the new leadership by buying them off with promises of political appointments and economic resources. For example, the FEJUVE is rumored to have purchased a new vehicle with money received from the government that is used by the executive.

Over his two year term, Mamani’s performance as Water Minister has been the subject of much controversy. In November 2007, a number of scandals implicating Mamani hit the press. He was promptly dismissed under a cloud of suspicion. The leaders of FEJUVE-El Alto immediately demanded that Mamani be replaced by another leader from El Alto. Instead, the government chose Walter Valda as interim minister, whose experience in the water sector is with campesinos in Chuquisaca. The inter-institutional commission has not met since the change of leadership in November. The question as to how or whether the EPSAS will be replaced hangs in the air.

Cochabamba Water War: “We Won the Struggle but not the War”
After Cochabamba’s Water War, “social control” was supposed to resolve the problems with corruption that have historically plagued public utilities. While the city water company’s former board of directors was staffed exclusively by professionals and politicians, since April 2002 three members elected from the macro-district sit on the board. However, the many problems that have historically plagued public utilities have remained unresolved with a minimal degree of “social control.”

Over the past eight years, the public water company in Cochabamba, SEMAPA, has gone from one crisis to the next. Since the company was returned to public hands after the Water War of 2000, two general managers have been dismissed for acts of corruption. The most recent general manager, Eduardo Rojas (2006-2007), was even worse than Gonzalo Ugalde (2002-2005). While both used the company as a botín politico (political booty), filling the company with their family members and friends, Rojas tended to hire white-collar workers (consultants and secretaries) who work at high salaries but do not provide a public service, while the latter mostly hired blue-collar workers to repair and expand the infrastructure. Due to these and other problems, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) cancelled the payments of an $18 million loan, the first part of which was to be dedicated to the “modernization” of the company. The utility is once again scrambling for finances in order to maintain and expand the city’s water and sanitation system.

On a more positive note, there are two important signs of that things might improve. First, there are signs of renewal in the water workers’ union. For over twenty years, the SEMAPA union was controlled by a “union mafia.” Union leaders were suspected of running a system of clandestine connections that was estimated to cost the utility almost $100,000 a month in lost revenue. A small group of employees have been working to democratize the union. Largely thanks to their efforts, the head of the union was fired in October 2005 for organizing an illegal strike that aimed to protest the dismissal of the corrupt general manager. For the first time in over twenty-five years, the elections that were held to replace him were conducted using secret ballot. Members also had a choice between two platforms of candidates. Nine out of ten members turned out to vote; over 70% of the members voted for the new leadership who expressed their commitment to union democracy.

Second, the association of community water systems of the poor, southern zone of the city (ASICA-Sur) has made a lot of progress in the past few years. ASICA-Sur has temporarily withdrawn from the struggle to reform SEMAPA, instead dedicating itself to the task of building water systems in poor areas that lack networked water services. Recently, ASICA-Sur has secured financing from the European Union to build secondary water networks in Districts 7 and 14. According to Abraham Grendydier, these systems will be administered by independent user groups, which will buy water in bulk from the public water company. In the short term, the initiatives of ASICA-Sur risk furthering fractioning the system, which is more accurately described as an “archipelago” than a network. In light of the numerous problems with SEMAPA, however, ASICA-Sur has made tactical decisions that will eventually help achieve the goal of “water for all.”

Given the problems confronted by SEMAPA in the past years, the local perception is that if SEMAPA serves as a model for anything it is for what can go wrong in a public water company. As Norma Barrera, one of the employees who have been working to reform the utility, put it, “The whole structure of the company needs to be changed from top to bottom. Putting a few good people at the top is not going to change anything when the structure is rotten to the core.” Amongst activists, opinion is divided regarding the main culprit. For some, it is the fact that the mayor controls the budget. For others, it is the problem of corruption and the lack of capacity of the citizen directors. Efforts to outline alternatives and debate the future of the public water company continue.

Conclusion
While the local results of the Cochabamba Water War may have been disappointing, its impact on the private sector rippled across the globe. Beginning in 2002, large multinational water companies announced that they were retreating from the poor countries of the global South, preferring instead to focus their investments in more lucrative markets. Indeed, the majority of privatization loans approved by the World Bank in 2006 for the water and sanitation sector were located in China. In the face of this global market shift, water justice activists in Latin America, widely considered to be both a birthplace of neoliberalism and its alternatives, can afford to be less defensive and critically scrutinize the failings of both private and public water companies.

It is undeniable that reform of the local state and public utilities are required in order to extend universal services. Examples of public water utilities suggest that there are several factors that help to determine success which have thus far been lacking in Bolivia. Public companies are more likely to perform well when they are subject to pressure from well-organized user groups, but as the Cochabamba example demonstrates, this is not enough. The presence of democratic trade unions with a “public service ethos” is also important, since it is ultimately the workers who execute the decisions. Perhaps most importantly, however, quality water services require large amounts of public investment. The progressive municipal government of Paco Moncayo in Quito, Ecuador, for example, expanded potable water services from 65% to almost 98% within only seven years thanks to a cash injection from the government and international sources. The water company, EMAAP-Q, is publicly owned and operated and considered one of the five best public water companies in Latin America.

Since most social movement efforts have necessarily focused on the problems with privatization, the factors that determine quality public management are poorly understood. Now that the multinationals are in retreat, however, there is more political space to discuss real alternatives.

—-

Susan Spronk is currently conducting research on the role of trade unions in water companies in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru.

This story first appeared April 29, with footnotes, on Upside Down World.

See related story, this issue:

POLARIZING BOLIVIA
Santa Cruz Votes for Autonomy
by Ben Dangl, Upside Down World
/node/5579

See also:

BOLIVIA: NEW “WATER WAR,” VIOLENT LAND CONFLICTS
from Weekly News Update on the Americas
World War 4 Report, January-February, 2005
/boliviawater

From our daily report:

Bolivia: Bechtel surrenders
WW4 Report, Jan. 24, 2006
/node/1528

Bolivia: Evo appoints rads to cabinet
WW4 Report, Jan. 24, 2006
/node/1529

——————-

Reprinted by World War 4 Report, June 1, 2008
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingBOLIVIA AFTER THE WATER WARS 

THE LANDOWNERS’ REBELLION

Slavery and Saneamiento in Bolivia

by Alexander van Schaick, Upside Down World

In recent weeks, cattle ranchers and landowners in Bolivia’s Cordillera province, located in the south of the department of Santa Cruz, resorted to blockades and violence in order to halt the work of Bolivia’s National Institute for Agrarian Reform (INRA). As a referendum on departmental autonomy for Santa Cruz draws near, the conflict calls into question the central government‚s ability to enforce the law in the Bolivian lowlands.

The dispute centers on the region of Alto Parapetí, south of the provincial capital of Camiri, where INRA is currently trying to carry out land reform and create an indigenous territory for the Guaraní indigenous people. Additionally, it claims various communities of Guaraní live and work on white or mestizo-owned ranches in conditions of semi-slavery.

For nine days landowners and their supporters blockaded major highways and virtually sealed off Alto Parapetí. The blockades continued until Bolivia’s vice minister of land, Alejandro Almaráz, left the region on April 18. At the end of February, Ronald Larsen, a major landowner in Santa Cruz, and other ranchers took Almaráz hostage at gunpoint for
several hours when he and other government officials tried to enter the region.

An Incomplete Land Reform
In the 1990s and up to the present, the Guaraní Nation and Bolivia’s other lowland indigenous peoples mobilized to force the national government to recognize their right to their ancestral territories. In 1996, the first administration of Gonzalo “Goni” Sánchez de Lozada passed a land reform law that gave Bolivia’s indigenous people the opportunity to claim their “communal territory of origin” (TCO).

The 1996 law—Ley No. 1715—reorganized the country’s land law and agrarian reform institutions. It also established INRA to resolve land conflicts and issue titles through a process called saneamiento. In this process, INRA would establish property limits, to look into whether property owners had obtained land legally and to investigate whether they were putting their land to socially or economically productive use. (Latifundios, or huge tracks of idle land used to speculate on rising land prices or as liens to obtain loans, are banned by the Bolivian constitution.) Finally, INRA would resolve land conflicts through mediation and legal processes, title TCOs for indigenous people, and establish parcels of state-owned land for distribution. In the end, landowners would own land with clear title. INRA was to carry out saneamiento throughout all of Bolivia between 1996 and 2006.

But after ten years, INRA had only completely finished the saneamiento process for 10% of its goal. Over half of the land INRA sought to have titled had not even begun the process. According to critiques from indigenous and campesino (peasant farmer) organizations, saneamiento was characterized by corruption, a lack of transparency and participation, and a bias in favor of large landholders.

In 2006, the administration of president Evo Morales pushed through several laws (particularly No. 3501 and No. 3545) in order to improve the saneamiento process for the benefit of peasants and indigenous people. Among other changes, the new laws attempted to improve the control indigenous and peasant organizations can exercise over the process, tightened restrictions on what constitutes the productive use of land, and gave INRA the authority to nullify property rights of landowners found to use workers in a system of servitude, captivity, forced labor, or debt peonage. INRA and the Vice-ministry of Land have also been much more active under Morales: in the first two years of his administration, INRA has finished the saneamiento process for 10.2 million hectares, as opposed to 9.2 million completed by the previous five presidents in the nine years since INRA’s founding.

One of the groups that has benefited the least from the saneamiento process has been the Guaraní people, Bolivia’s third largest indigenous group. Guaraní communities populate Bolivia’s Chaco, an arid region that spans parts of the Departments of Santa Cruz, Chuquisaca, and Tarija. Only between 5 and 10 percent of the land demanded for TCOs by Guaraní communities has been granted, whereas other lowland indigenous groups have received much higher percentages of their demands for communal land.

The Asamblea del Pueblo Guaraní (APG) has made claims to INRA territory in Alto Parapetí since 1996. Only in February of this year did INRA start the process for the titling of a TCO “Alto Parapetí,” totaling 157,000 hectares of land. Through the saneamiento process, INRA will catalogue what of this 157,000 hectares is available for future Guaraní use and what land is being used in a legal fashion by existing property owners.

INRA also will investigate which landowners have workers in conditions of servitude. According Law 3545 and its governing rules, the state does not recognize the legal property rights of a landowners’ estate if he or she is found to have one or more persons working under conditions of modern-day slavery or servitude. If this is the case, the estate becomes state land that the government, in the case of Alto Parapetí, will include in the formation of a TCO. (Article 4e of Law 3545 requires that the state guarantee that people formerly subjected to a labor regime of peonage, captivity, forced labor, or servitude have access to land.) At the end of the saneamiento, INRA will give land titles to the Guaraní community and all existing, law-abiding landholders.

The APG, the national organization of the Guaraní nation, backed Evo Morales and his Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) party during the elections of 2005. It hoped that a MAS government would respond to its demands for the territorial reconstitution of Guaraní ancestral lands. The results have been mixed: while Guaraní communities have received far more land than under previous administrations, the APG feels like the current government can do better. One of the key conditions for the Guaraní Nation’s continuing support of the Morales administration may be the successful titling of the TCO “Alto Parapetí” and the liberation of Guaraní “captive” communities in the region.

“Now Blood Will Run”
Conflicts in Alto Parapetí between INRA and large landowners began in February of this year. On February 12, INRA issued a decree committing to title a TCO “Alto Parapetí” for the APG. Beyond the recuperation of territory for the APG, the creation of a TCO would provide the base for the liberation of Guaraní families living in servitude on large landowners’ estates in the area. According to a report released by the Swiss Red Cross and the Bolivian Ministry of Justice in 2006, there are ten “captive” Guaraní communities in Alto Parapetí that live under a system of semi-slavery: Yaiti, Yapui, Yapumbia, Recreo, Itacuatía, Huaraka, Bajo Carapari, Alto Carapari, La Colorada y Tartagalito.

INRA initiated the process of saneamiento by another decree on February 26. Vice-minister of Land Alejandro Almaráz and the national director of INRA, Juan Carlos Rojas, came to Camiri to personally supervise the launch of saneamiento with the participation of the Guaraní community.

The reaction to the start of saneamiento from the landowning and cattle ranching sector was swift and severe. On February 28, a group of 50 to 100 landowners and their supporters forced INRA officials out of their office, which they preceded to sack. They demanded that the land titling process in Alto Parapetí be halted. After the incident, the Mburuvicha Guasu (Grand Captain) of the Guaraní community in Alto Parapetí, Félix Bayanda, condemned the ranchers for trying to stop the saneamiento process:

“This is [an] abuse from the cattle ranchers, who don’t want to recognize the existence of enslaved communities and who misinform the people,” he said. “The Guaraní people are prepared to defend our communities‚ demand to end once and for all the servitude and enslavement of our people. The Assembly of the Guaraní People will fight for their demands and we will initiate mobilizations in Santa Cruz, Chiquisaca and Tarija.”

In spite of the threats, INRA also reiterated its commitment to carrying out the saneamiento, as required by the law. Following the incident, on the evening of February 29, Vice-minister of Land Almaráz, INRA director Rojas, APG president Wilson Changaraya, and other INRA officials entered Alto Parapetí. Their goal was to notify property owners that the saneamiento process was commencing. According to an interview with Almaráz and accounts published in the press, as the INRA vehicle drove by the property “Caraparicito,” a large cattle ranch owned by an American, Ronald Larsen, they came across a tractor blocking the road.

A group of landowners surrounded their vehicle, led by Larsen, who was armed with a revolver and a rifle. Larsen proceeded to shoot out the tires of the INRA vehicle to prevent the escape of the land reform officials. He reportedly yelled, “Now we are going to carry out community justice on you.” He ordered the INRA vehicle to be dragged onto his property with the tractor. Later, he bragged to Almaráz that he had shot and killed three robbers that had come on to his property and no authority had ever found out. Another local landowner, Lino Medrano, allegedly threatened “No one is going to leave here alive, now blood will run.” Two members of the INRA team escaped to Camiri, where they obtained reinforcements who returned and freed the remaining INRA officials after their eight-hour ordeal.

Interestingly, no immediate action was taken against Larsen. According to Almaráz, witnesses are giving testimony before the public prosecutor of Camiri in order to bring a case against Ronald and Duston Larsen for sedition, criminal association, impeding and extorting official government activity, attempted murder, aggravated robbery, and kidnapping.

Conflicts Escalate
After being released, Almaráz and Rojas called for dialogue in an attempt to reengage the small producers of the region. INRA issued public statements explaining that the saneamiento would not negatively affect any property owners with under 500 hectares of land. They convened an INRA meeting on March 10 in order to engage all the actors affected by the saneamiento process. Most large landowners, however, boycotted that meeting, and are still refusing to participate in any INRA-sponsored dialogue.

On March 11, the President of the Unión de Productores Agropecuarios del Sur (the local cattle rancher and farmers association), Juan Carlos Santistevan, issued a press statement saying that the cattle ranchers of the Cordillera would give their lives to protect their land and to oppose the creation of a Guaraní TCO in Alto Parapetí. According to statistics published by the Vice-ministry of Land, Santistevan owns 1,885 hectares in the area.

Tensions boiled over again on April 4, when Almaraz, Rojas, representatives of the APG, and several dozen national police once again tried to enter Alto Parapetí through the municipality of Lagunillas. According to statements and testimonies from INRA, Guaraníes, and Almaráz, the group was on the way to participate in a meeting convened by the APG in the Guaraní community of Itacuatía. The week prior, over 450 Guaraní traveled to Itacuatía for the meeting before landowners essentially sealed off the area. Once again, the convoy was halted as they tried to pass by the property of Caraparicito. Duston Larsen, son of Ronald Larsen, and a group of people armed with sticks, rocks, and guns violently prevented them from passing. Police officers dispersed the crowd; however the convoy still could not pass.

On April 5, various sectors in Alto Parapetí allied with the landowners issued a declaration, “Cordillera de Pie,” which accused the government and INRA of attempting to violently enter Alto Parapetí the previous day. The document also demanded:

“That the vice-minister of land, national director of INRA, technical personnel and police contingents halt the abuses and illegalities that they come to commit against our people and that in the term of 24 hours they definitively abandon the province of Cordillera in order to avoid other consequences which, if they do occur, will be the unique and exclusive responsibility of the government.”

Almaráz, however, reiterated that government officials and the INRA team would remain in Camiri until the saneamiento process had been completed.

On April 9, landowners and their supporters blocked major interdepartmental highways between the city of Santa Cruz and Camiri, between Camiri and the southern departments of Chuquisaqa and Tarija, as well as all entrances into Alto Parapetí. Although the landowners originally declared the blockades would be lifted after 24 hours, they continued until April 18 when Almaráz finally left the region.

Both sides on the conflict mobilized their supporters. The APG issued a statement declaring a state of emergency for the Guaraní Nation and convoking representatives from all 26 Guaraní Capitanías (districts):

“The Guaraní Nation will not renounce its social, political, economic and cultural rights to the recuperation and consolidation of its territory, natural resources and Indigenous Autonomy; thus, it declares a state of emergency and calls the 26 Captains and the social organizations allied with the Guaraní Nation and other sectors, to join the fight to defend the Guaraní Nation‚s historic demand of Territorial Reconstitution and liberation of enslaved families.”

On the other hand, the government has reported that at least several hundred members of the proto-fascist Unión Juvenil Crucenista traveled to Camiri to support the blockades.). The Union Juvenil Crucenista is a “youth” organization widely considered to be the violent arm of the Comité Cívico Pro-Santa Cruz, a powerful association of the elites in Santa Cruz.

A little over a week after their first attempt, they tried to enter Alto Parapetí again. At 4:45 PM on Sunday, April 13, Almaráz, Rojas, Changaray, INRA officials, and several dozen Guaraní, without police escort, tried to pass a blockade in the town of Cuevo again trying to reach the community of Itacuatía. According to Almaráz, in Cuevo, a crowd of several hundred landowners, townspeople and members of the Unión Juvenil Crucenista threw a hail of rocks at the convoy to repulse them. As the convoy tried to return to Camiri, landowners and their supporters ambushed them, partially blocking the road and firing guns. They prevented several trucks from passing. Those people unfortunate enough to be left behind were forced out of their trucks, threatened, and beaten with sticks and rocks.

According to the mayor of Cuevo, Sonia Guthrié, a supporter of the landowners’ blockade, the group of INRA vehicles “entered firing their guns in the air. Later, with violence and slingshots, they managed to get beyond the first blockade. But, then we organized ourselves and in the Matadero zone we were able to stop them. They ran off towards the woods.” She displayed two rifles and six other guns taken from a vehicle carrying Guaraníes as proof of the group’s hostile intent. Members of her retinue have made press statements claiming that Vice-minister Almaráz is trying to form armed guerilla groups in the Chaco in order to “train a FARC in the Cordillera.”

Almaráz rebuked this claim saying, “nobody from the Vice-ministry or INRA had guns. I don’t know what the Guaraní had, but I didn’t see any of them with guns.” In response to the version of events given by Mayor Guthrié, Almaráz pointed out that the vast majority of people injured in the incident were Guaraní or government employees. The Bolivian state information agency, ABI, published a list of 46 people injured in the incident by hospital in which they received treatment; 11 suffered “grave” injuries and 35 “light” injuries. Juan Carlos Rojas, national director of INRA, was listed as gravely injured.

The government also published a list of five people who have “disappeared.” Several people, including the APG’s lawyer, testified to having been captured, taken back to Cuevo, and tortured, at least one of whom was whipped and beaten in the town’s plaza. The crowd also looted and destroyed several government vehicles. According to the landowners, five of their supporters in Cuevo were lightly wounded.

The government temporarily has suspended saneamiento activities and recalled Almaráz to La Paz. By doing so, it hopes to diffuse tensions and allow an inter-institutional commission of human rights organizations, the press, and the religious community to enter the region in order to investigate rights abuses and open dialogue. Nevertheless, a negotiated, peaceful resolution to the conflict will be difficult to achieve.

Freeing Slaves or Grabbing Resources?
Both sides in the dispute over the saneamiento of Alto Parapetí have very different views of why the conflict is happening. The government claims that the saneamiento process and the creation of a TCO represents the way in which various Guaraní communities living in a system of semi-slavery can be freed and assured a sustainable rural livelihood. The landowners and their supporters maintain that the issue of slavery is a red herring invented by the MAS government and that the saneamiento is part of larger processes by which the government hopes in the future to gain control over local hydrocarbon resources and dissolve the municipalities in the region.

Numerous Bolivian and international human rights organizations have published reports on the existence of systems of semi-slavery on estates in the Chaco. Estimates vary, but at least 600 Guaraní families live in such conditions in the departments of Santa Cruz, Chuquisaca and Tarija. These families have no land of their own and live in communities located on the estates of their masters. In the documentary “Quiero ser libre, sin dueño” (“I want to be free, without a master”), produced by the Bolivian Ombudsman’s office and the Ministry of Justice, dozens of Guaraníes give dramatic testimony to conditions on estates in Chuquisaca. Although treatment varies, interviewees testify to working for their masters over 12 hours a day for between ten cents to two dollars a day (far below what they legally should receive); sometimes workers receive no pay at all, only second-hand clothes and food. Debt slavery is common, where debts supposedly incurred by the Guaraní to their masters (sometimes passed down from their parents) effectively negate their pay. Child labor and corporal punishment are widespread.

Local Guaraní leaders express their frustration that they have nowhere to turn. Local authorities are either landowners or under the landowners’ influence, and previous governments turned a deaf ear to their plight. According to the Fidel Cejas, captain of Alto Parapetí, “In all of the district of Alto Parapetí nobody treats our brothers well and it’s sad to think about the abuse: psychological, physical, even the rape of the daughters of our brothers, and assassinations as well. Complaints have been made, but the authorities don’t carry out justice when such complaints are made.”

For many Guaraní interviewed in the documentary, a community’s access to its own land to cultivate represents the path to freedom, dignity, and the recuperation of culture and language. In the past, the Centro de Investigación y Promoción de Campesinado (Center for the Research and Promotion of Peasants, or CIPCA) and Catholic organizations have liberated several Guaraní communities in servitude by given them land purchased from landowners. Government and NGOs hope saneamiento will solve the problem.

The most vocal support for the landowners in Alto Parapetí has come from agricultural and cattle producers’ associations and local Cordillera politicians. They have also received full support from prominent figures in Santa Cruz. Given the sensitivity of the semi-slavery issue, these powerful politicians’ willingness to back the landowners indicates the extent to which the Cruceña landed elite occupies or influences the institutional spaces of power in Santa Cruz.

The Comité Cívico Pro-Santa Cruz, the strongest non-governmental political organization in Santa Cruz, has come out strongly behind the landowners in Alto Parapetí. Branko Marinkovic, president of the Comité, stated in reference to the events of April 13, “In no way do we accept this kind of violence, we ask the president to call back his functionaries because they will not conduct saneamiento with violence and the organization of paramilitary groups to make Bolivians fight each other.” Although different groups have played the deciding role in the Comité at different times, Gisela Lopéz, a journalist and former editor who covered land issues at El Deber, Santa Cruz’ paper of record, explains that:

“The Comité Cívico Pro-Santa Cruz has a long history of real civil struggles of the region and for the region, but in the last 20 years, it has been ‘taken over’ by the cruceño power elites, groups that have controlled the principle institutions in Santa Cruz (telephone, electricity, and water cooperatives, among others). And, now, the Comité Pro-Santa Cruz is lead by a huge landowner (Marinkovic) who utilizes the Comité for the defense of his particular interests and has been chosen to defend the landed elite from the current government of Evo Morales.”

Marinkovic is not only a major landowner in Santa Cruz, he also owns one of Bolivia’s biggest cooking oil companies.

Rubén Costas, the prefect (or governor) of Santa Cruz, also has supported the struggle of landowners in Alto Parapetí. Costas is one of the leading opponents of the Morales government and previously served as president of the Comité Civico. He counts on the political support of landowners and is considered to be close to Marcelino Apurani, the far-right sub-prefect of Cordillera province. According to reports by Bolpress, Apurani played a divisive role in a February meeting between INRA and landowners, where he attempted to sabotage dialogue and push landowners in a radical direction against saneamiento.

The landowners and their allies have presented their resistance to saneamiento as a fight to defend their land and to maintain Departmental control over hydrocarbon resources. They have seemingly successfully portrayed the conflict in the media as another struggle of the people of Santa Cruz against the impositions of the Morales government. They claim that if INRA creates a TCO for the Guaraní in Alto Parapetí, it will set the conditions for the Guaraní to later create an autonomous indigenous territory if the new Bolivian constitution passes its referendum vote. If these things come to pass, they argue that the Department or the municipality “lose control” over the oil and gas resources in the TCO and that the municipalities in Alto Parapetí would dissolve. These concerns are most succinctly put in the document “Cordillera de Pie”:

“WE WILL NOT ALLOW, under any circumstances, actions or activities of agrarian reversion, expropriation, reorganization or the creation of new community lands of origin supported in the illegal law 3545 and its regulations, that attempt to take control of the petroleum, aquifers and gas reserves of our department, cut and destroy municipal jurisdictions and confiscate individual and collective productive private properties.”

Government officials have responded that the creation of a TCO would have no effect on the amount of money the municipalities would receive from hydrocarbons. Subsoil resources pertain to the State, so the taxes on oil and gas exploitation that are redistributed to municipalities (such tax money also goes to universities, departments, and the national social security system) would not be changed.

Regarding the issue of servitude, the landowners and many of their allies claim there are no captive communities in Alto Parapetí and that such claims are merely stories invented by the MAS government to legitimize their hidden agendas.

Another landowner demand is that the saneamiento be halted until after May 4, the day of the vote on the controversial Santa Cruz “Autonomy Statutes.” Although in a July 2, 2005 referendum a majority of Santa Cruz’s residents voted in favor of regional autonomy, no legal framework exists for establishing what regional autonomy means or how it should be established. Nevertheless, a set of “Autonomy Statutes” were written up by a group of “legislators” appointed by the Departmental Prefect with the strong backing of the Comité Civico and agro-business associations. The Departmental Electoral Court in Santa Cruz set May 4 as the date when the statutes will go to referendum. The National Electoral Court, Bolivia’s highest decision-making body on such matters, ruled the referendum outside the law and ordered the departmental court to cease and desist its actions. The Departmental Electoral Court, however, has refused to comply.

Article 102, one of the articles relating to land policy in the Autonomy Statutes, states that:

“Property rights over land, the regulation of rights, the distribution, redistribution and administration of lands in the province of Santa Cruz are the responsibility of the Provincial Government and will be regulated through a Provincial Law by the Provincial Legislative Assembly.”

The authority to carry out saneamiento would thus be transferred from the central government to the departmental government and, by extension, into the hands of the landed elite. While it is doubtful that the government of Evo Morales will recognize the Autonomy Statutes’ legality, it is easy to understand why the large landowners of Alto Parapetí would seek to postpone saneamiento until after May 4. Effectively, the landowners may have won on this front. As this article goes to press, one week remains before the referendum and it appears unlikely that the government will restart saneamiento beforehand.

Ronald Larsen: Gringo Instigator of the Landowners‚ Uprising?
One of the more bizarre aspects of the conflict is the controversy surrounding Ronald Larsen, the landowner of US citizenship who reportedly sequestered Almaráz and others at gunpoint on February 29. According to documents released by government sources, Larsen’s story goes back to 1968, when, after fighting in the Vietnam War, he came to Bolivia where he has lived since without residency on a tourist visa. His son, Duston Larsen, who was captured on Bolivian TV leading the group that violently prevented INRA from passing Lagunillas on April 4, was chosen to be “Mister Bolivia” in 2004. Duston also appeared as himself in the popular Bolivian comedy “Quién Mató a la Llamita Blanca.”

The Larsens have been among the leaders of the resistance to saneamiento in Alto Parapetí. During the Banzer dictatorship of the 1970s, Ronald Larsen began consolidating properties in Santa Cruz, eventually becoming one of Santa Cruz’s biggest landholders. He and his family hold at least 57,145 hectares of land in Santa Cruz although discrepancies between records held by INRA and the Agrarian Superintendent may mean he own an additional 10,000 hectares. In Alto Parapetí the Larsen family holds at least 15,777 hectares of land in five different properties. According to Bolpress, Larsen also has strong links to the right wing in Santa Cruz, having wined-and-dined with Rubén Costas and Branko Marinkovic among others on his estate in the Cordillera.

Minister of Rural Development Susana Rivero claimed on Bolivian state TV that in preliminary interviews with INRA Larsen admitted that a Guaraní community lives on his property and performs services for him, apparently not knowing that such a labor relation means that this community is in “captivity” according to Bolivian law.

More Conflict on the Horizon
Larsen aside, the conflictive situation in Alto Parapetí has highlighted a disturbing trend that is becoming increasingly common in Santa Cruz: the willingness of the landed elite to use violence to halt land reform, and the central government’s inability to protect their supporters in the indigenous community as well as their own employees from such violence.

Thus far, the saneamiento has gone nowhere. Given the state’s weakness in Santa Cruz and the level of resistance put up by landowners over the past months, the Morales government will face an uphill battle if it again tries to carry out its land reform agenda in Alto Parapetí. Making matters worse, the May 4 referendum on the “Autonomy Statutes” will likely pass (although with high abstention rates; its opponents are boycotting the vote). This will give landowners additional rhetorical ammunition, even though the central government will not recognize its legality.

The government may be banking on the Inter-institutional Commission and a different Parliamentary commission to release reports verifying systems of servitude in Alto Parapetí. A clear, unequivocal statement from the commissions confirming the existence of captive communities might give the government the legitimacy to use force to carry out the saneamiento. Given the large landowners‚ trenchant resistance to losing their way of life and privilege, it seems unlikely that any accord that does justice to the Guaraní community will be reached through dialogue. More violent conflict may be on the horizon.

—-

Alexander van Schaick is currently a Fulbright Scholar in Bolivia. Until recently he also was an organizer for the IWW in New York City.

This story first appeared April 28, with footnotes, on Upside Down World.

See related story, this issue:

POLARIZING BOLIVIA
Santa Cruz Votes for Autonomy
by Ben Dangl, Upside Down World
/node/5579

From our daily report:

Bolivia polarized on eve of autonomy vote
WW4 Report, May 4, 2008
/node/5439

——————-

Reprinted by World War 4 Report, June 1, 2008
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingTHE LANDOWNERS’ REBELLION 

MEMOIRS OF A TIBETAN MARXIST

Middle Ground Between Mao and the Dalai Lama?

by William Wharton, WW4 Report

Book Review:
A TIBETAN REVOLUTIONARY
The Political Life and Times of Bapa Phuntso Wangye
by Melvyn C. Goldstein, William R. Siebenschuh and Dawei Sherap
University of California, 2004

There is little middle ground in the China-Tibet debate. Grace Wang found this out the hard way when the Duke University freshman attempted to mediate a hostile encounter between pro-Tibet and pro-China demonstrators. The reward for her efforts was an attack on her parent’s house in China and a string of death threats. This individual incident highlights the need to identify independent perspectives within a sea of polarized positions. A Tibetan Revolutionary: The Political Life and Times of Bapa Phuntso Wangye offers the unique voice of an historical actor who is both culturally Tibetan and politically Marxist.

Bapa Phuntso Wangye, commonly known as Phunwang, has dedicated his life to the liberation of the greater Tibet region. The vehicle for achieving this liberation changed over time— moving from peasant rebellion to Tibetan-Chinese cooperation to advocacy of national self-determination within the Chinese Communist Party. Such personal transformations occurred within shifting Chinese-Tibetan relations in the 20th century. If this is the only lesson one takes away from this work it is useful. Relations between China and Tibet reached critical turning points in the 20th century, and are not the simple representations of some ancient regional antagonism. Much of the current conflict is rooted in decisions made in this conjuncture.

Phunwang’s testimonial (made in a series of interviews and then translated and slightly annotated by the book’s editors) is organized into four distinct historical periods. The first runs roughly from the early 1940s until the Chinese Revolution of 1949. The second is smaller but contains the most important opportunities for a rapprochement between Tibet and China, from 1949 until the Great Leap Forward of 1957. Much darker is the period from 1957 until Mao’s death in 1976 which includes the experiences of the Cultural Revolution. Finally, Phunwang provides a brief sketch of the period from 1976 until the present.

Phunwang was born in a region called Kham, just to the east of Tibet proper (today part of Sichuan province). Despite the cultural distinctiveness of the region, its inhabitants still consider themselves to be culturally Tibetan (anthropologists use the categories “political” and “ethnographic” Tibet). The region’s eastern location also led to a more direct engagement with China. During Phunwang’s formative years, Kham was occupied by the Chinese nationalist government led by the Guomindang (GMD). His early years in universities nominally controlled by the GMD led to a rather elaborate education in Marxist theory. His primary university was run by the GMD’s Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission, the Chiang Kaishek Central Political Institute. The goal was to educate Mongolian and Tibetan students from Kham and Qinghai as GMD administrators for the region, but the school was infiltrated by teachers sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Phunwang was immediately drawn to the notions articulated by Josef Stalin regarding the components necessary for identify a nation and Vladimir Lenin’s writings on the rights of nations to self-determination. The troika was made complete by an acceptance of Mao Zedong’s strategies of guerilla war.

Theory soon turned to action as Phunwang abandoned his studies, and organized a group of classmates to seek out political, financial and military backing in order to launch of a war of liberation in Tibet. This journey took him from a brief flirtation with the CCP to secretive meetings with a pro-Soviet faction of the Communist Party of India. In both cases, his appeal for support was met by little else but promises for the future delivered via messages that made the Chinese and Soviet desire for balance and stability clear.

Phunwang believes that the Soviets rejected him because they were not sure of the outcome of World War II—would they be negotiating with the GMD, CCP or Japanese? The CCP was leery of opening up a western front which they did not have direct control over. Rejection by the international left did little to damper the revolutionary élan of Phunwang, but did force him to seek out allies in unusual places.

Acting as a cultural insider, he was able to associate with younger more progressive members of the Tibetan aristocratic class. These “reformers” craved Phunwang’s knowledge of the outside world and, through conversation, expressed a desire to renovate and modernize Tibetan society. In exchange, they provided Phunwang with easy passage across the Tibetan border, thereby providing a safe-haven for cross-border anti-GMD activity.

But it was the GMD that really opened the conjunctural possibilities by allowing the formation of small-scale anti-Japanese militias. Operations reached a head in 1946 as Phunwang and his compatriots forged an alliance with a military leader contesting for local supremacy, Gombo Tsering, in the south of Kham. Tsering first acted as a Red Army-appointed commander (after the CCP set up a nominal Tibetan government in the region during the Long March), and then as a leader of anti-Japanese Tibetan militias for the GMD. He was easily swayed as to the necessity of the liberation of Kham from the GMD—while certainly understanding the possibilities for self-promotion offered by a successful revolt. With a funding and weapons source secured, Phunwang organized the Eastern Tibetan People’s Autonomous Alliance and set out to launch a guerilla war. Two days prior to the launch date, a local rival militia attacked Gombo Tsering and Phunwang after rumors were spread that Tsering had sold the community’s guns to “communists.” Phunwang and a handful of followers were forced, penniless and unarmed, west into Tibet proper.

After a perilous trip across the mountains, the defeated Phunwang and comrades arrived in Lhasa in 1947. Once again, he relied on the protection of progressive aristocrats to this time organize the underground Tibetan Communist Party (TCP). By 1948 the possibility of the CCP seizure of power in China had become a reality. Conservative sectors of the Tibetan aristocracy became unnerved and began to accuse Phunwang of being a CCP-supporter. Finally, in July 1949, he was expelled from Tibet and forced back across the eastern border. In October 1949 Mao Zedong proclaimed the formation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), thereby ending Phunwang’s dream of self-emancipatory peasant guerilla war.

As a committed communist and cultural Tibetan with the contacts and linguistic skills necessary to facilitate the “liberation” of Tibet, Phunwang became a valuable resource for the CCP. After a bit of contentious brokering which foreshadowed later conflicts, the TCP was folded into the structures of the CCP. The next two years were spent building a progressive bloc which united the leadership of the CCP with the cultural and political leadership of Tibet, including the Dalai Lama.

This process culminated in the drafting of the Seventeen-Point Agreement of 1951. Phunwang admits that these negotiations took place under the implicit threat of the invasion of Tibet by the forces of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) although he does defend the document as a reasonable solution to Tibet-China relations. The document served the CCP by ensuring that Tibet would accept the organization of a Military and Administrative Bureau to govern the region (with the Dalai Lama at the head of the bureau), by accepting a resolution to the dispute between the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama and, perhaps most importantly, by acquiring Tibetan consent to the installation of PLA troops in the region.

For Tibetans, the agreement avoided an uneven war, secured guarantees of cultural and political autonomy, and ensured that “reforms” of the Tibetan social structure would proceed slowly. In this period, necessary reforms were (slowly) implemented in Tibet and Kham—health care, labor laws, public works. There was a general agreement between the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan aristocracy to support these measures. Phunwang, as one of the few Tibetan cadre, acted as a key cultural and political broker for the CCP.

Unfortunately for Phunwang, the revolutionary leaders who signed the agreement, such as Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, were not the CCP operatives charged with implementing it on the ground. A series of PLA commanders charged with securing the region practiced a form of Han Chinese chauvinism and ultra-leftism, and proceed to carry out acts of cultural insensitivity and corporal punishment—including the public whipping of Tibetans. CCP administrators such as Fan Ming did little to hide their distaste for Tibetans and desire to rapidly transform the region, thereby violating the Seventeen-Point Agreement.

Then, in 1955, Mao shifted to the left and began a process of criticizing the central government for the slow implementation of communism. One year later, Ming launched an aggressive campaign to accelerate the reform process. Thousands of Han Chinese CCP cadre flooded into Tibet and the Chinese authorities began buying up real estate and businesses from the Tibetan elite. This sudden infusion of wealth into the region had the unintended effects of exposing the local population to a hyper-inflated economy and allowed the aristocracy to easily smuggle its now-liquid wealth across the border into India.

By the time Mao’s left-critique was translated into policy in 1957 with the Great Leap Forward—which the CCP claimed would allow the country to surpass both the USSR and US in economic production—Phunwang’s progressive bloc had been shattered. This began the second period of relations from 1957-1976 which, according to Phunwang, was characterized by Han chauvinism under the guise of ultra-leftism.

As the previous compromise was unwound, conservative elements in Tibet and the scorned reformers organized a rebellion against the PLA in 1959. (Phunwang employed a Chinese proverb to express the futility of any armed resistance by the Tibetan leadership—”Whether the rock hits the egg, or the egg hits the rock, the result is always the same.”) Meanwhile, the CCP ran an internal purge against “local nationalisms” and began to systematically eliminate any representatives of Tibet’s local ethnic groups (even though they, like Phunwang, were loyal members of the CCP).

When Phunwang returned to Beijing in 1958 he was instructed by CCP officials to “cleanse his thinking of local nationalism.” Remarkably, one piece of evidence used against him was a dog-eared copy of Lenin’s On Nationality Self-Determination, which he was accused of bringing into Tibet. The first stage of punishment was exclusion from party activities, but this soon grew into imprisonment as the general purge accelerated.

Phunwang was held without explicit charges from 1960 until his release in 1979. He recounts in vivid detail the excruciating mental and physical suffering of his incarceration, most of which was served in solitary confinement. After years of futile verbal sparring with interrogators, Phunwang decided in 1969 to take a vow of silence. His wife was also arrested and committed suicide rather than suffer a similar fate.

Phunwang served his sentence alone and in silence for the next six years until officials transferred him to a mental hospital for prisoners. When his family was finally allowed to visit in 1975, Phunwang had physical difficulties speaking as no words had passed his lips in more than six years.

After his release from prison, he waged a one-person campaign within the CCP to have his name “rehabilitated.” After accomplishing this, Phunwang went to work attempting to bring the CCP’s policies on ethnic minorities more in line with what he viewed as a Marxist-Leninist position. In this section of the book, Phunwang is guarded, preferring to speak less about Tibet in particular and more about ethnic minorities in general. He specifically advocates the recognition of local ethnic leadership with political autonomy within the greater PRC, an end to the use of the PLA as a police force and as a weapon to suppress revolts, the placing of strict limits on Han Chinese internal migration, and the prioritizing of local interests and decision-making in the planning of national economic projects. He calls for free and open education in ethnic minority culture and language, and open discussions on China’s future which include representatives who explicitly self-identify with the interests of ethnic minorities.

Phunwang remains in China and, as of 2004, was still a member of the CCP. The last official position he held was the deputy director of the Nationalities Committee of the National People’s Congress from 1985-1993.

Overall, A Tibetan Revolutionary can serve the role of dispelling myths being circulated by both the pro-Tibet and pro-China camps. Phunwang’s argument concerning rights to self-determination as advocated in the Leninist tradition is convincing and highlights the overall drift of the Chinese Revolution. More importantly, he illustrates the manner in which policies crafted during the ultra-left period of 1957-1976 have continued to be employed by the CCP. What is left unmentioned are the economic and political interests served by their continuance. Taken together, these arguments seriously undermine the Chinese claim that the Tibet movement is a product of exile agitation. Instead, Tibet seems to be one part of a much broader contradiction within the PRC regarding the rights of ethnic minorities. This is a problem which many communist projects have, in practice, offered little solution to beyond the maintenance of “unity” through political repression.

Pro-Tibet claims for independence are also complicated by Phunwang’s testimonial. He is quite explicit in indicating that in the 1950s the desire/demand for complete independence from China was expressed only by the more conservative sectors of the Tibetan religious and economic aristocracy. The Dalai Lama and a significant portion of the aristocracy were interested in modernizing Tibet and viewed integration into the newly-created PRC as a vehicle to do so. However, one wonders whether in 2008 the reforms mentioned by Phunwang are either acceptable to the majority of Tibetans or even possible within the framework of the PRC.

Can ethnic minorities gain representative rights through dialogue with the thoroughly undemocratic internal political decision-making apparatus of the CCP? Is independence and a revolutionary splitting-off from the PRC the only way to secure such rights? The Dalai Lama’s recent request to initiate dialogue with the CCP suggests a willingness to accept a compromise resolution short of independence. Such an approach stands in stark contrast to both the sentiments of pro-Tibet supporters in the West and his demonization in the official media organs of the CCP.

Thus, in Phunwang’s eyes, the Dalai Lama remains a central figure to the resolution of the Tibet-China conflict: “[T]here is no reason to have suspicions regarding the intentions of the Dalai Lama, and no reason to distort his sincere, selfless thought and attack his incomparable character.”

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William Wharton is editor of The Socialist, monthly magazine of the Socialist Party USA.

RESOURCES

Vladimir Lenin, The Rights of Nations to Self-Determination
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/self-det/index.htm

Josef Stalin, Marxism and the National Question
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03.htm

Mao Zedong, On Guerilla Warfare
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/1937/guerrilla-warfare/index.htm

Addendum: The 1924-1937 Panchen Lama dispute
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See related story, this issue:

TIBET: ROOTS OF THE UNREST
Colonization and Resistance on the Roof of the World
by Carole Reckinger, Toward Freedom
/node/5409

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Special to World War 4 Report, May 1, 2008
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingMEMOIRS OF A TIBETAN MARXIST 

TIBET: ROOTS OF THE UNREST

Colonization and Resistance on the Roof of the World

by Carole Reckinger, Toward Freedom

On March 10, a group of about 500 Buddhist monks marched from the Drepung monastery (one of the “great three” university monasteries in Tibet) to demand the release of monks arrested last October for celebrating the award of a US congressional Gold Medal to the Dalai Lama. Marking the 49th anniversary of the failed uprising against the Chinese occupation of Tibet, they chanted “Free Tibet” and “Dalai Lama” outside the holiest temple in Tibetan Buddhism where they were joined by hundreds of lay Tibetans. Between fifty and sixty monks were arrested as police and paramilitary units blocked roads and surrounded other monasteries in the Lhasa area to prevent protests from growing. Despite the heavy crackdown, over the next days the protests rapidly spread, and unrest has been reported throughout Tibet and in provinces close to Tibet with large ethnic Tibetan populations.

China’s harsh response to the uprising has sparked international criticism and has marred preparations for the upcoming Beijing Olympics. China claims 18 people have been killed by rioters in Lhasa, but the Tibetan government in exile argues that at least 99 people have died in the crackdown at the hands of Chinese troops. Hundreds of people have reportedly been arrested, and in Lhasa the containment continues, with the military patrolling every corner of the city.

China has been aggressively censoring international media, and foreign journalists remaining in Tibet were forced to leave the province. The authorities in Tibet gave the protesters an ultimatum on March 17; the region’s governor said protesters who turned themselves in would be “treated with leniency within the framework of the law… otherwise, we will deal with them harshly.” Two days later the authorities announced that 160 Lhasa rioters had given themselves up. How many more have been arrested is still unclear. The violence is not over yet, and sporadic demonstrations continue to flare up.

The People’s Republic argues that the violence was orchestrated by the exiled Dalai Lama and has accused him and his supporters of trying to sabotage the Olympics to promote Tibetan independence. The Dalai Lama, who won the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize for his commitment to nonviolence in the quest for Tibetan self-rule, has denied these allegations and instead has called for talks with Chinese President Hu Jintao. Almost half a century after he fled into exile in India, the Dalai Lama has raised the extraordinary prospect of travelling to Beijing to hold face-to-face talks.

In truth, the demonstrations reflect a convergence of longstanding grievances and more temporal issues ranging from recent tension over Tibetan cultural practices to China’s rising demand for raw materials which has substantially increased the Chinese presence in Lhasa. The planned passage of the Olympic torch through Lhasa in the coming weeks has been another factor in lifting tensions, although the Dalai Lama himself does not support an Olympic boycott.

Longstanding Grievance: Chinese Occupation
In 1949, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) crossed into Tibet. After defeating the small Tibetan army, the Chinese government imposed the so-called “17-Point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet” in 1951. The threat of immediate occupation and the presence of over 40,000 troops left Tibetans with little choice other than to sign the document acknowledging Chinese sovereignty over Tibet but recognizing the Tibetan government’s autonomy with respect to Tibet’s internal affairs. The treaty was repeatedly violated as the Chinese consolidated their control, and open resistance to Chinese rule grew—leading to a National Uprising in 1959.

Tibet was independent at the time of China’invasion. From 1911 to 1950, it successfully avoided undue foreign influence and remained neutral during the Second World War. China argues today that “no country ever recognized Tibet” and that Tibet has been part of the Chinese nation since the 13th century. In the course of Tibet’s 2,000-year history, however, it came under foreign influence only for short periods in the thirteenth and eighteenth century. Tibet was ruled by Dalai Lamas since the 17th century. The International Commission of Jurists’ Legal Enquiry Committee on Tibet reported in its 1960 study on Tibet’s legal status that”

Tibet demonstrated from 1913 to 1950 the conditions of statehood as generally accepted under international law. In 1950, there was a people and a territory, and a government which functioned in that territory, conducting its own domestic affairs free from any outside authority. From 1913-1950, foreign relations of Tibet were conducted exclusively by the Government of Tibet, and countries with whom Tibet had foreign relations are shown by official documents to have treated Tibet in practice as an independent State.

Resistance to Chinese Rule
In the early years of the Chinese occupation, control was maintained by force. More than one million of the province’s six million people died according to an estimate by the Tibetan government in exile. Furthermore, an unknown number of people languished in prison and labor camps or fled the country. Limited relaxations of China’s policies in Tibet came only very slowly after 1979. Resistance to Chinese occupation started to take an organized form as early as 1952. As the Chinese presence became increasingly oppressive, resistance reached massive proportions and Tibetans rose up in March 1959. The uprising was brutally crushed by the Chinese military and in the next months at least 87,000 Tibetans died in Central Tibet alone. The Dalai Lama fled the country only hours before the compound he was staying in was shelled by Chinese artillery, killing thousands of people who had gathered around the building to protect him.

Very similar to Burma, Buddhist monasteries are among the few institutions in China which have the potential to organize resistance and opposition to the government. BBC’s Peter Firstbrook argues that China’s crackdown on the monk-led rallies in Lhasa is part of a long history of state control of the monasteries and Buddhist orders. The government’s regulation of monasteries started almost as soon as the PLA marched into Tibet in 1950. Still today, every aspect of the lives of Buddhist monks and nuns is monitored.

Following the invasion, Tibet’s culture was suppressed and more than 6,000 monasteries, temples and historic buildings were destroyed. The population was subjected to terror campaigns and massive “re-education” efforts. China’s consistent use of excessive military force to stifle dissent has resulted in widespread human rights abuses, including political imprisonment, torture and execution. At least 60 deaths have been documented by human rights groups since 1987 and the names of over 700 Tibetan political prisoners have been confirmed. Many are detained without charge or trial through administrative regulations entitled “re-education through labor.”

China’s grip on the Buddhist orders became very visible in 1995, when the Dalai Lama named the new reincarnation of the Panchen Lama (second only to the Dalai Lama in terms of spiritual seniority in Tibet). The selected six-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima and his immediate family disappeared within days and until today his whereabouts are unknown. The Tibetan government in exile claims that he continues to be the youngest political prisoner in the world. The Chinese government asserts that he is leading a normal life somewhere in China and that his whereabouts are kept secret to protect him. Soon after the disappearance, the Chinese government announced that it had found the real Panchen Lama, a six year old who happened to be the son of two Tibetan Communist Party workers. Most monks regard him as a “false” lama, though he is venerated by ordinary Tibetans.

China’s Closing Grip
More recently, Beijing has attempted to pacify Tibet by large transmigration schemes. In 1987, open demonstrations took place against Chinese rule in Lhasa that were mainly triggered by the large influx of Chinese migrants into Tibet. It is estimated that the immigrant Han Chinese now outnumber the Tibetans in their own land. They are resented by Tibetans, who argue that they take the best jobs, and the Dalai Lama has accused China of “cultural genocide.” The overall impact of the influx has been devastating and the Chinese have gained political, economic and military control in Tibet. “The more Tibet is converted into a Chinese province, populated by Chinese, the stronger China’s strategic position along the Himalayas will be,” the International Campaign for Tibet sums up Beijing’s policy.

Tibet is the highest country on earth, and its fragile high-altitude environment is increasingly endangered by China’s exploitative policies. Five of Asia’s great rivers have their source in Tibet and more than half of the world’s population depends on these rivers. Deforestation in the high plains of Tibet due to extensive resource extraction has already been linked to severe floods in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. It is still unclear what impact the crisis in Tibet will have in the long term. The options for many Tibetans are changing, and many are increasingly frustrated as they can see little sign of progress after decades of waiting. Many young Tibetans have become increasingly impatient with the Dalai Lama’s peaceful means. Although they remain loyal to the Dalai Lama, they believe that confrontation might be more effective for securing their rights.

Even if demands for independence are growing among Tibetans in exile, it seems politically a distant hope. The idea of independence puts Tibet in direct conflict with Beijing, and it is very unlikely that China would agree to any negotiations unless independence was ruled out as a pre-condition. China will try to avoid by all means setting a precedent that could influence other ethnic minorities. The Dalai Lama calls for greater autonomy within China, along the lines of either the “one country—two systems model” of Hong Kong, or the self-rule formula agreed on from 1951-1959 which gave Tibet much more control over its affairs than it has now. Although many Tibetans perceive the upcoming Olympic Games as a sort of leverage in negotiations, it is unlikely that the Chinese will give in.

The spotlight is nonetheless on China, and it cannot afford to crack down too hard on the Tibetan people. During the last upheaval in 1987, very few in the West knew where Tibet was, let alone knew much about its tragic history. The Chinese government responded in its typical manner with executions, arbitrary arrests and torture, and very few in the world took note of what was happening. China was still a relatively isolated country and didn’t need international opinion on their side. Nineteen years down the road, much has changed. The Dalai Lama has managed to raise Tibet’s profile and China has “opened up.” It has been admitted to the WTO, has secured billions in corporate capital, and is hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Beijing 2008
China has tried hard to remove politics from the Olympics and takes the line that political protesters agitating about China are violating the spirit and charter of the Games. However, eliminating politics from the Olympics will prove very difficult, if not impossible. The games have indeed served as a stage for politics a number of times: Hitler, for example, used the Berlin 1936 games; Helsinki 1952 was the beginning of the Cold War; and Munich 1972 was marked by the slaying of 11 Israeli athletes.

Since Beijing was selected, international opinion has been sharply divided between those who thought the Games could help reform China and those who thought they would simply validate the regime. International pressure will undoubtedly have an effect; the question is only how much high-level pressure will be put on the Chinese government. This point could prove to be the most disappointing.

The Tibetan people are today one of the best examples of a people with the right to self-determination. Solidarity protests have taken place over the whole world. Public opinion matters at the moment for China, and more pressure must be put on the Beijing government. What would happen if every single sportsman would express their grave concern about the human right situation in Tibet and other places in China? Could Beijing ignore this? Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky’s outraged comment about the holding of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow—”Politically, a grave error; humanly, a despicable act; legally, a crime”—remains valid for Beijing 2008.

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This story first appeared March 24 in Toward Freedom.

More of Carole Reckingers stories can be read at:
http://1000forgottenstories.wordpress.com/

SOURCES

Latest update on Tibet Protests
The Government of Tibet in Exile, March 32, 2008 http://www.tibet.com/NewsRoom/tibetupdate1.htm

Beijing seals off Tibet as deadline for protesters passes
The Guardian, March 21, 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/17/tibet.china1

History since the Chinese Invasion
International Campaign for Tibet
http://www.savetibet.org/tibet/history/sincechinese.php

History of Tibet before the Chinese Occupation
International Campaign for Tibet
http://www.savetibet.org/tibet/history/beforechinese.php

Human Rights
International Campaign for Tibet
http://www.savetibet.org/tibet/humanrights/index.php

Tibetan Environment
International Campaign for Tibet
http://www.savetibet.org/tibet/index.php

Tibetan Monks: A controlled Life
BBC News, March 20, 2008
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7307495.stm

White Paper, Government of Tibet in Exile, March 21, 2008 http://www.tibet.com/WhitePaper/exesum.html

The Dalai Lama attacks cultural Genocide
The Independent, March 21, 2008
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/dalai-lama-attacks…

China’s Quandary over Tibet’s Future
BBC News, March 21, 2008
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7305558.stm

Beijing Olympics: Let the Politics Begin
International Herald Tribune, March 21, 2008) http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/13/asia/letter.1-113324.php

Repression continues in China six months before the Olympic Games
Reporters without Borders, March 21, 2008
http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=174

From our daily report:

Chinese police gird for repression
WW4 Report, April 28, 2008
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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, May 1, 2008
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingTIBET: ROOTS OF THE UNREST 

MAPPING THE COMPLICITY OF ISRAELI ARCHITECTURE

from NOT BORED!

Book Review:
HOLLOW LAND
Israel’s Architecture of Occupation
by Eyal Weizman
Verso Books, 2007

We believe we know the basics of the central conflict in the Middle East: the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, that is to say, the conflict over the partition of Palestine. Even before the Israeli “War of Independence,” or the Palestinian “Catastrophe,” depending upon your viewpoint (either way it took place between 15 May 1948 to 20 July 1949), no one could propose a partition that would be satisfactory to both sides. Jewish and Arab areas were either intermixed and far too close to separate out, or they virtually overlapped. In 1947, for example, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) was unable to carve out a contiguous Israeli state out of Palestine, and so had to content itself with proposing the creation of two politically separate but geographically overlapping and interconnected states, one Israeli, the other Palestinian. Over the course of the creation of the “Green Line,” which marked the separation between the new State of Israel and its neighbors at the moment of the 1949 Armistice, more than 700,000 Palestinians were either displaced from or forced out of their homes in Israel “proper.”

A great many of the refugees took up “temporary” residence in camps in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, which were, unfortunately but not unexpectedly, among the precise territories that Israel would seize and begin occupying in the aftermath of the June 1967 war. Starting in late 1967, and in clear violation of both international law and its own laws—battles have been fought in the Israeli High Court of Justice ever since—Israel began to systematically “settle,” that is to say, colonize the West Bank (especially “Greater Jerusalem”) and the Gaza Strip. Though the Sinai Peninsula was returned to Egypt by 1982, illegal settlements continued to proliferate throughout the Occupied Territories. There have been two Intifadas (rebellions) against Israel’s on-going occupation and colonization: the first was fought between 1987 and 1993, when the first Oslo Peace Accords were signed; the second began in September 2000 and is still going on. In 2003, supposedly as a result of the second Intifada, Israel began the construction of a massive “West Bank Wall,” which—though still incomplete—now winds a complicated, highly controversial (totally illegal) path, separating (illegal) “settlements” from a patchwork made up of hundreds of parcels of land under the partial sovereignty of the Palestinian people, but actually remote-controlled, if not directly occupied, by Israel.

Yes, we know all this, and yet—despite the fact that this conflict is 60 years old—we have very few widely available maps of the Occupied Territories. I mean good maps; accurate, informative and useful maps; ones that actually show what’s “happening on the ground.” This makes one wonder: Is it even possible to make a map of the West Bank? Is the West Bank a political geography that is so intensely complicated that it cannot be mapped?

In Chicago (Stiedl, 2006), their book about a mock-Palestinian town in the middle of the Negev Desert created for war games by the Israeli military, photographers and authors Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin note that “maps, land deeds, names, and documentary evidence [of Palestinian life before 1948] have been systematically erased.” The only maps that have been available are Israeli maps, that is, maps created and/or approved by the Israeli Defense Forces (the IDF), and not everyone has had access to—or even realized the importance of—these maps. As Edward Said reported in “Palestinians under Siege” (London Review of Books, Dec. 24 2000), the Palestinian negotiators “had no detailed maps of their own at Oslo; nor, unbelievably, were there any individuals on the negotiating team familiar enough with the geography of the Occupied Territories to contest decisions or to provide alternative plans… [I]n none of the many dozens of news reports published or broadcast since the present crisis began has a map been provided to help explain why the conflict has reached such a pitch.” One must remember that, across the table from the mapless Palestinians at Oslo weren’t civilian Israeli negotiators, but military men who certainly knew “the lay of the land” very, very well: they were precisely the ones who had shaped it.

Remarkably, virtually anyone can confirm this maplessness. Go online, call up the much-celebrated Google Maps, and search for either “Israel” or “the Occupied Territories.” In either case—the blurring between the two is highly significant—you will find that, in the “Map” setting, absolutely none of the major highways, cities and towns are indicated, nor are any of these basic facts presented by the “Satellite” and “Terrain” settings. (As per normal, such basic information is indicated in the corresponding displays for Lebanon, Syria or Egypt). And so, strictly speaking, Google Maps does not have a map of either Israel or the Occupied Territories. Yes, it is true that there are satellite pictures of the highways, cities, towns, streets and houses in these areas, but pictures do not make a map, which must be read as well as simply looked at, questioned as well as simply appreciated for existing. It is also true that the “Terrain” setting works perfectly well, but such topographical information is completely useless if it can’t be combined with a map of the areas under consideration, especially in Israel and the West Bank, where the terrain changes, as one moves from west to east, from beaches to mountains within the space of just a few miles, and where, especially in the West Bank, the illegal Israeli settlements (and other “security” installations) are up on the hilltops and the Palestinian towns and refugee camps are down in the valleys. It is for this precise reason that a picture of an Israeli settlement taken from above is likely to be pleasing, while a picture taken from ground level—where the disparity is clear between hill and valley, Israeli and Palestinian, rich and poor—is likely to be disturbing. Only the latter could reveal the presence of houses permanently divided between floors, houses with “roads” constructed upon their roofs, or true “highways” that connect hilltop enclaves together via lengthy elevated platforms. Finally, in all three of Google Maps’ settings, one is prevented from zooming in close to the ground or, rather, as vertiginously close as one can when viewing, say, Beirut, Damascus or Cairo. Especially in East Jerusalem, “clouds” (intentional distortions of the images?) prevent one from seeing certain buildings and streets clearly.

Odd things, certainly. But mysteries? No: the answer is simple. Google Maps, which gets all of its satellite imagery as declassified feeds from the US Department of Defense (which of course has close ties with the Israeli military), has agreed to make the deletions mentioned above in the name of protecting the “security” of Israel against its enemies: “We do not use our satellites against our allies.” (Quoted in Weizman, p. 270) Like any other enemy, whether they be state-conscripted armies, volunteer armies, mercenaries, or groups of “terrorists,” Israel’s enemies require maps, which furnish crucial information about Israel (“The company [Google Earth] estimates that 80 percent of the world’s information can be plotted on a map in some way,” Associated Press, April 8, 2008). Because these enemies might be anywhere in the world, the IDF has decreed that the whole world cannot have a map of Israel or the territories that it is occupying. In a way, these limits set upon the world’s perception and knowledge of itself (these limits to “globalization,” if you like) also help Israel to assert absolute sovereignty over both its own territory and the territories it occupies: a sovereignty that exists over both airspace and “outer space.” (And this at a time when both the national sovereignty and the sovereign airspace of such nations as Afghanistan and Iraq has been violated, captured and occupied by the United States and its allies!)

And so it was a major event when the Israeli architect Eyal Weizman published the world’s first comprehensive map of the Occupied Territories in May 2002. In the “postscript” to his remarkable book Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, Weizman notes:

Establishing its perspective with the triangulations of high points of the terrain, later with aerial photography and satellite imagery, mapping has until recently been almost exclusively associated with the mechanisms of colonial power. However, since the start of the [second] Intifada, it has increasingly become more commonly associated with attempts to oppose and disrupt it… In 2001 Yehezkel Lein, a researcher from [Israeli human rights group] B’Tselem, invited me to collaborate on the production of a comprehensive report, Land Grab, which aimed to demonstrate violations of Palestinian rights through the built environment, especially in the planning of Israeli settlements. Analysing [many] series of drawings, regulations, policies and plans, undertaking a number of on-site measurements and oversite flights, we identified human rights violations and breaches of international law in the most mundane expressions of architecture and planning… The crime was undertaken by architects and planners in the way they drafted their lines in development plans. The proof was in the drawings. Collecting evidence for this claim against the complicity of architecture in the occupation, we synthesized all drawings and collated all the masterplans onto a single map. [Pages 261 and 262]

Entitled “Map of Jewish settlements in the West Bank,” Weizman’s map is still available on-line at B’Tselem and was reprinted in Hollow Land, which also includes Weizman’s map of Gaza, which he completed in 2005. Both maps are professionally designed, very detailed and color-coded. They are “difficult.” But the thing that makes them “difficult” is in fact not their method of presentation, but the super-complexity of the spatial arrangements and practices that they depict. For example, Weizman’s map of the West Bank carefully and legibly reveals the presence of ten different types of areas (three kinds of Israeli settlements, Israeli military bases, and six kinds of Palestinian lands, including two classifications for Hebron). It turns out that to map the Occupied Territories, Weizman did not need to develop a new method of mapping: he needed to work in and through new conceptions of space, spatial practice and the built environment.

In Weizman’s words, his map quickly “became one of the geographical tools for advocacy actions against the Israeli government”; it caused “a ‘spatial turn’ in the discourse surrounding the occupation,” which “has helped extend our political understanding of the conflict to a physical, geographical reality, and led to the production of a wide range of maps, drawn and distributed by a multiplicity of political and human rights groups.” In a footnote to these lines, Weizman proudly reports that his map (plus the accompanying research) was “produced as evidence by the Palestinian legal team at the International Court of Justice in the Hague in its rulings on the Wall in the winter of 2003.” He also frankly declares that “Lein and I were later alarmed to learn that the Israeli Ministry of Defence planners had themselves made use of it for their own purposes.”

Though he makes no claims to be a revolutionary, Weizman’s map was a revolutionary accomplishment, a revolutionary endeavor that was specifically intended to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, not “reform” or humanize it. He rather modestly likens his work to the efforts of such independent Palestinian organizations as the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem (ARIJ) and Bimkom (Planners for Planning Rights), and the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition (ICAHD), all of which, he says, engage in “acts of advocacy aiming to put pressure on the Israeli government to end the occupation.” Weizman contrasts the work of these groups to the efforts of “other architects, [who] operating especially through humanitarian organizations and different UN agencies, help in the designing and improvement of Palestinian refugee camps, in the reconstruction of destroyed homes and public institutions, and with the relocation of clinics and schools cut apart from their communities by the West Bank Wall.” These efforts do not intend to end the occupation, but to “make somewhat more bearable the lives of Palestinians under Israel’s regime of occupation.” As a result, they are open to the following critique:

Poorly considered direct intervention, however well intentioned, may become complicit with the very aims of power itself. Interventions of this kind often undertake tasks that are the legal—though neglected—responsibility of the military in control, thus relieving it of its responsibilities, and allowing it to divert resources elsewhere. Furthermore, by moderating the actions of the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] they may even make the occupation appear more tolerable and efficient, and thus may even help, by some accounts, to extend it. This problem is at the heart of what came to be known as the “humanitarian paradox.”

In a footnote to this passage, Weizman refers his readers to Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995; translated from the Italian 1998): “This is one of the reasons… Agamben observed that humanitarians ‘maintain a secret solidarity with the powers they ought to fight.’ For him, both concentrate on the ‘human’ rather than on the ‘political’ aspect of being. Agamben further warned that ‘there are no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems.'” Elsewhere in his book, Weizman gives a concrete example of the “process by which the military incorporates into its operations the logic of, and even seeks to cooperate directly with, the very humanitarian and human rights organizations that oppose it”—the IDF’s cynical “Another Life” program (summer 2003), which was supposedly intended to “minimize the damage to the Palestinian life fabric in order to avoid the humanitarian crisis that will necessitate the IDF to completely take over the provision of food and services to the Palestinian people.”

It is important to note that Weizman’s reference to Giorgio Agamben is uncharacteristic of his book as a whole. With the exception of the works of Michel Foucault—in particular, the 2003 collection entitled Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976, to which Agamben himself often refers—Weizman doesn’t mention, re-present or “borrow from” any critical theorist other than himself. (One might especially question the complete absence from Hollow Land of Gaston Bachelard and Henri Lefebvre, two pioneering theorists of space and spatial practices.) Generally speaking, Weizman discusses well-known contemporary critical theorists—Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari mostly, but also Guy Debord and Georges Bataille—because parts of the IDF have taken such a strong interest in the military applications of their work. Though Weizman’s self-sufficiency hurts him a bit when he comes up with boxy phrases and sentences such as “optical-political camouflage” and “like a theatrical set, the panorama [of the Israeli settlement at Shiloh] is seen as an edited landscape put together by invisible stagehands who must get off the set as the lights come on”—why not just refer to Debord’s theory of the society of the spectacle?—it helps him in the overall effect of his book, which is very impressive indeed.

Hollow Land concentrates on the post-1967 period: “It looks at the ways in which the different forms of Israeli rule inscribe themselves in space, analysing the geographical, territorial, urban and architectural conceptions and the interrelated practices that form and sustain them.” To organize his material, Weizman has neatly superimposed topography and chronology:

Starting in the deep aquifers of the West Bank, it progresses through its buried archaeology and then across its folded topographical surface to the militarized airspace above. Each chapter, describing different spatial practices and technologies of control and separation, focuses on a particular period in the history of the occupation.

But this method is not an academic or self-interested exercise, i.e, not the use of the “example” of Israel to demonstrate a certain theoretical approach to spatial practice. This is a reckoning. If the occupation has indeed been a “laboratory of the extreme,” a laboratory that has acted “as an accelerator and an acceleration of other global political processes, a worst-case scenario of capitalist globalization and its spatial fall-out”, then its experiments have produced definitive results. “In this way, the succession of episodes following the development of Israel’s technologies of domination and Palestinian resistance to them also charts a tragic process of cumulatively radicalizing violence,” Weizman writes. “However, with the technology and infrastructure deemed necessary for the physical separation of Israelis from Palestinians, it appears that the vertical politics of separation and the logic of partition have been fully exhausted.” The “human/humanitarian solution” (the demographic separation of populations) has failed; it must be abandoned and replaced by a “political solution” (perhaps the unification of all of Palestine into a single nation that brings the populations together as equals).

Though Weizman refers to “the traditional perception of political space”, which “is no longer relevant” because “a new way of imagining space has emerged”, he does not adequately define or illustrate what it is, which deprives his readers of a full understanding of the nature and significance of this “new way of imaging space.” He only gives us the following (quite useful, but not sufficient) distinction between borders and frontiers.

Against the geography of stable, static places, and the balance across linear and fixed sovereign borders, frontiers are deep, shifting, fragmented and elastic territories. Temporary lines of engagement, marked by makeshift boundaries, are not limited to the edges of political space but exist throughout its depth. Distinctions between the “inside” and the “outside” cannot be clearly marked. In fact, the straighter, more geometrical and more abstract official colonial borders across the ‘New Worlds’ tended to be, the more the territories of effective control were fragmented and dynamic and thus unchartable by any conventional mapping technique. The Occupied Palestinian Territories [can] be seen as such a frontier zone… The frontiers of the Occupied Territories are not rigid and fixed at all; rather they are elastic, and in constant formation. The linear border, a cartographic imaginary inherited from the military and political spatiality of the nation state has splintered into a multitude of temporary, transportable, deployable and removable border-synonyms—”separation walls”, “barriers”, “blockades”, “closures”, “road blocks”, “checkpoints”, “sterile areas”, “special security zones”, “closed military areas” and “killing zones”—that shrink and expand the territory at will… Elastic territories could thus not be understood as benign environments: highly elastic political space is often more dangerous and deadly than a static, rigid one.

And so, we offer the following sketch, not to make any definitive definitions, but to help fill in the background that Weizman has left blank. In the traditional perception of political space, such as it has been defined by Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (or at least our understanding of it):

1) Space is a pre-existing given; it is available, naturally, like a raw material; it is not socially “produced” or “refined” in any way before it is claimed and put to use.

2) Space itself is either empty or (partially or completely) filled: it is likened to a container of some kind (a sphere or a cube).

3) Empty space is “neutral” space; space is only “political” or “political space” when it is partially or completely filled, that is, put to use.

4) In this apparently pre-political geometrical space, the key feature is the boundaries or borders that clearly separate inside from outside, and outside from inside. They are fixed and rigid, and cannot be bent, compressed, stretched or broken (even temporarily).

5) Internal space (within the sphere or cube) is homogenous; it is external space that is varied, diverse or fragmented. Thus, “power” originates in internal space, and is exerted upon the external.

6) Internal space can thus be divided or multiplied “cleanly” (concentric spheres or smaller cubes fitting snugly within larger cubes to follow the examples in #2 above).

7) In part due to #3 and in part due to other factors, social or political space is understood to be a simple three-dimensional embodiment, transference or materialization of two-dimensional, geometrical space.

This perception/conception of space cannot see or understand such “conceptual” or “theoretical” phenomena as frontiers; temporary interruptions or suspensions of the law (states of exception); trans-boundary flows; interstitial space(s); “elastic” or “pliant” lines, or even optical-political camouflage. But when it is confronted with the built environment in the Occupied Territories—that is to say, with such apparently arcane, extraneous, irrelevant or insignificant phenomena as “cladding and roofing details, stone quarries, street and highway illumination schemes, the ambiguous architecture of housing, the form of settlements, the construction of fortifications and means of enclosure, the spatial mechanisms of circulation control and flow management, mapping techniques and methods of observations, legal tactics for land annexation, the physical organization of crisis and disaster zones, highly developed weapons technologies and complex theories of military manoeuvres”—the traditional perception of space becomes a hindrance to seeing what is actually happening, and why. It keeps looking in the wrong direction. As the IDF showed in its March 2002 raid into the Balata refugee camp near Nablus—during which its commando units completely avoided the major intersections, streets, building exteriors and entrances (all of which were barricaded and booby-trapped), and burrowed into and through the walls of civilian homes, instead, thus completely surprising their adversaries, despite the high degrees of their vigilance and preparation—such oversights can be fatal.

When one compares the map (“Starting in the deep aquifers of the West Bank, it progresses through its buried archaeology and then across its folded topographical surface to the militarized airspace above”) to the territory, one finds that Weizman’s book primarily concerns the region’s “folded topographical surface.” The aquifers (and sewage disposal) are discussed in a single chapter (“Interlude—1967,” which is a kind of second introduction to the book as a whole). Archeology (and the government-mandated use of stone as a building material and/or cladding) are also discussed in a single chapter (“Jerusalem: Petrifying the Holy City”) Also discussed in single chapters are the central role played by Ariel Sharon, who served in a variety of key government and military positions over the course of his 40-year-long career (“Fortifications: The Architecture of Ariel Sharon”), and “militarized airspace” (“Targeted Assassinations: The Airborne Occupation,” which is the last chapter). The remaining six chapters are devoted to the Occupation’s “folded topographical surface.” This arrangement gives the book as a whole the topography of a plateau: a quick rise, a long leveling out, followed by a steep incline.

“One of the most crucial battlegrounds of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is below the surface,” Weizman writes in the “Interlude—1967.”

About 80 percent of the mountain aquifer is located under the West Bank… The erosion of the principles of Palestinian sovereignty in its subsoil is carried out by a process so bureaucratically complex that it is almost invisible. Although the aquifer is the sole water source for residents of the West Bank, Israel uses 83 per cent of its annually available water for the benefit of Israeli cities and its settlements, while West Bank Palestinians use the remaining 17 percent. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank and virtually all Palestinians in Gaza thus receive water irregularly and in limited amounts. Israel’s “politics of verticality” is also manifested in the depth to which water pumps are allowed to reach. Israeli pumps may reach down to the waters of the common aquifers, whilst Palestinian pumps are usually restricted to a considerably shorter reach, only as far down as seasonal wells trapped with shallow rock formations, which, from a hydrological perspective, are detached from the fundamental lower layers of “ancient waters.”

And yet both lower and upper water tables are being contaminated by raw sewage.

The Israeli authorities failed to provide the minimum necessary sewage infrastructure for Palestinians throughout the period of direct opposition although this is the legal duty of an occupying force [under international law]. The sanitary conditions of West Bank Palestinians were aggravated by Israel’s segregation politics that isolated Palestinian towns and villages behind barriers of all kinds. This policy generated more than 300 pirate dumping sites where truckloads of waste were poured into the valleys beside towns and villages. Paradoxically, the restrictions on the flow of people [in the West Bank and between the West Bank and Israel “proper”] accelerated the trans-boundary flow of their refuse. Furthermore, Israeli companies have themselves used sites in the West Bank for their own waste disposal… In the wild frontier of the West Bank, Israel’s planning chaos means Jewish neighborhoods and settlements are often [hastily] constructed without permits, and populated before and regardless of sewerage systems being installed and connected. This sewage runs from the hills to the valleys, simply following the force of gravity and topography, through and across any of the boundaries that may be put in front of it… Mixing with Palestinian sewage, traveling along the same open valleys, [Israeli sewage] will eventually end up in Israeli territory. Instead of fresh water flowing [from underground aquifers] in the specially conceived water pipes installed under the Wall, Israel absorbs large quantities of raw sewage from all across the West Bank. The enclosures and barriers of the recent [counter-measures against the] Intifada thus created the very condition against which they sought to fortify. [Emphasis added]

“Planning chaos” should not be simply taken to mean that Israeli planning is chaotically organized, but also that the chaos that results from it is not completely accidental and has to some extent been planned. “The spatial organization of the Occupied Territories is a reflection not only of an ordered process of planning and implementation, but, and increasingly so, of ‘structured chaos’, in which the—often deliberate—selective absence of government intervention promotes an unregulated process of violent dispossession.” And so, the very thing that is feared (contamination by “dirty” Palestinians) is brought about by the measures taken against it. But instead of seeing the stupidity of its intelligence, the Israeli government asserted that this breakdown in fact confirmed its hygienic (xeno)phobia. “By inducing dirt and raw sewage, Israel could go on demanding the further application of its hygienic practices of separation and segregation,” Weizman writes. “The result is an ever-radicalizing feedback loop.”

Archeology has also been a crucial battleground in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Weizman reminds his readers that:

On 27 June 1967, twenty days after the Israeli Army completed the occupation of the [formerly Jordanian] eastern part of Jerusalem, the unity government of Levi Eshkol annexed almost 70 square kilometers of land and incorporated almost 70,000 Palestinians within the newly expanded boundaries of the previously western Israeli municipality of Jerusalem… The new boundaries sought to “unite” within a single metropolitan area the western Israeli city, the Old City, the rest of the previously-administered city, 28 Palestinian villages, their fields, orchards, and tracts of desert, into a single “holy”, “eternal” and “indivisible” Jewish capital.

The problem, of course, was the unwanted presence of those 70,000 Palestinians. And so, “following [the urban] masterplan [of 1968] and a series of subsequent masterplans, amendments and updates during the forty years of Israeli occupation, twelve remote and homogenous Jewish ‘neighborhoods’ were established in the occupied areas incorporated into the city,” Weizman reports. “They were laid out to complete a belt of built fabric that enveloped and bisected the Palestinian neighborhoods and villages annexed to the city… An outer, second circle of settlements—termed by Israeli planners the ‘organic’ or ‘second wall,’ composed of a string of dormitory suburbs—was established beyond the municipal boundaries, extending the city’s metropolitan reach even further. An ever-expanding network of roads and infrastructure was constructed to weave together the disparate shards of this dispersed urban geography.” In 2007, when Hollow Land was published, “Greater Jerusalem” included 200,000 Israeli settlers, which was approximately the same number as all of the other settlers in the West Bank combined.

To ensure that this “land grab” remained permanent, that is, capable of surviving any future attempts to partition the City in a different way, the very soil underneath, adjacent to and surrounding these settlements had to be secured, and done so “legitimately.” And so: “On 27 June 1967, the same day that Arab Jerusalem and the area around it was annexed to Israel, the Israeli government declared the archaeological and historical sites in the West Bank, primarily those of Jewish or Israeli cultural relevance, to be the state’s ‘national and cultural property,’ amounting to a de facto annexation of the ground beneath the Occupied Territories, making it the first zone to be colonized.”

In an attempt to naturalize and standardize the unification and on-going expansion of Greater Jerusalem, Mayor Kollek Teddy inaugurated the biennial Jerusalem Committee, the Advisory Committee of which included prominent urban planners, architects, architectural critics, historians, theologians and biblical scholars. As Weizman bitterly notes, these people “never challenged the political dimension of the municipal plan and Israel’s right or wisdom in colonizing and ‘uniting’ the city under its rule, nor did it discuss the dispossession of Palestinians that it brought about.” In addition to calling for the systematic excavation and exact reconstruction of archaeological finds, and their incorporation into the overall urban design scheme—as the architect Louis Kahn did for the 18th century Hurva Synagogue—these advisors insisted upon tightening a bylaw from the British Mandate circa 1918 that required the use of certain kinds of limestone as the only material allowed on the exteriors of the city’s buildings and streets, and extending the bylaw’s reach to the entire area annexed to the city. “Stone cladding was used to authenticate new construction on sites remote from the historical centre, giving the disparate new urban shards a unified character, helping them appear as organic parts of the city.” (Emphasis added) We can say that, because these new buildings strove to reject modernism and to look old (biblical era), rooted in archaeological sites (which in fact were not beneath them), and yet genuinely “authentic,” they can be identified as simulacra (copies of things that never existed). And because the “unified character” of Greater Jerusalem was in fact produced according to plan rather than restored according to discovery, we can call stone-clad Jerusalem a spectacular city, that is, unified in appearance only.

For Weizman, the “folded, topographic space” of the Occupation is dominated by four spatial practices (all of them spectacular):

1) the Israeli settlements in the hills, which are “intensely illuminated… visible as brilliant white streaks of light that contrast with the yellowish tint of the light in the Arab villages and towns” in the valleys. Weizman calls this spatial practice “optical urbanism.”

2) the West Bank Wall, which, “although none of the maps released by the media or independent [human] right[s] organization[s] actually show it, and all photographs of it depict a linear object resembling a border (and which all foreigners from territorially defined nation states will immediately understand as such)… has in fact become discontinuous and fragmented series of self-enclosed barriers that can be better understood as a prevalent ‘condition’ of segregation—a shifting frontier—rather than one continuous line neatly cutting the territory in two.”

3) the spectacle of surveillance, which not only is staged at the hilltop settlements (“During the [second] Intifada, the military finally ruled that settlements be surrounded by several layers of fencing systems, cameras equipped with night-vision capability and even motion detectors placed on the perimeter fence, further extending the function of the naked eye”), but also at terminal checkpoints (“the architecture of the Allenby Bridge terminal incorporated within the scale of a building the [same] principle of surveillance that [had] dictated the distribution of settlements and military bases [on the hilltops] across the Occupied Territories”) and along the aforementioned West Bank Wall (“The main component of the barrier is a touch-sensitive, ‘smart’, three-metre-high electronic fence… It also has day/night vision video cameras and small radars”).

(Note well that surveillance is also the central element in the “militarized airspace” above the Occupied Territories: Since 2004, “with the development and proliferation of drone technology,” Weizman explains, most targeted assassinations of Palestinian “militants” and “terrorists” are carried out by remote-controlled Unmanned Aerial Vehicles [“drones”] that were originally designed to engage in video surveillance and have been freshly equipped with laser-guided, anti-tank “Spike” missiles.)

4) the IDF’s methods of conducting urban warfare.

(Because this particular spatial practice is so closely associated with “complex theories of military manoeuvres,” including the theories of space elaborated by several bellicose critics of what Weizman calls “the capitalist city” [Deleuze & Guattari, Debord, Bataille, et. al], it warrants being treated at some length.)

Weizman reports that, “following global trends, in recent years the IDF has established several institutes and think-tanks at different levels of its command and has asked them to reconceptualize strategic, tactical and organizational responses to the brutal policing…in the Occupied Territories known as ‘dirty’ or ‘low intensity’ wars.” One of these institutions was the Operational Theory Research Institute (OTRI), which instructed all high-ranking Israeli officers—as well as some members of the US Marine Corps—between early 1996 to May 2006, under the co-directorship of Shimon Naveh and Dov Tamari, both retired brigadier generals. One avid disciple of the OTRI was Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi, who was the commander of the IDF’s March-April 2002 attacks on the Balata refuge camp in Nablus and several Palestinian cities in the West Bank. In an interview with Weizman, Kochavi explained that “the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner,” that is to say, “the alley [is] a place forbidden to walk through and the door [is] a place forbidden to pass through, and the window [is] a place forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors.” It is precisely this potentially deadly situation that has prevented urban warfare from being widely or frequently conducted by “traditional,” state-conscripted armies. In the situation sketched out by Kochavi, the Palestinians’ defensive position is far too strong for any attacking force to be successful, that is to say, any attacking force that feels itself bound by the constraints of international law and therefore would not, for example, simply drop a bomb on the entire neighborhood and kill everyone. But the IDF under the command of Kochavi did not feel itself bound by any law.

I do not want to obey this interpretation [of space, but also international law] and fall into his [the enemy’s] traps. Not only do I not want to fall into his traps, I want to surprise him. This is the essence of war. I need to win. I need to emerge from an unexpected place. And this is what we tried to do. [Kochavi, quoted in Weizman, p. 198]

And so, the IDF “won” in Balata and elsewhere by committing war crimes: it penetrated into, occupied, fought from within and eventually destroyed the domiciles of the civilian population in a zone “temporarily” occupied after a war.

This is why opted for the method of walking through walls… We took this micro-tactical practice and turned it into a method, and thanks to this method, we were able to interpret the whole space differently. [Kochavi, quoted in Weizman, page 199]

As Weizman notes, “the reference to the need to interpret space, and even to re-interpret it, as the condition of success in urban war, makes apparent the influence of post-modern, post-structuralist theoretical language.” Kochavi was indeed introduced to “theory” while at the OTRI, which used theory to help the IDF understand “urban fighting as a spatial problem.” (Shimon Naveh, quoted in Weizman, p. 200). According to Weizman, Naveh gave a presentation on military and guerrilla operations in 2004 that “employed the language of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,” whose books, Weizman says, “draw a distinction between two kinds of territoriality: a hierarchical, Cartesian, geometric, solid, hegemonic and spatially rigid state system; and the other, flexible, shifting, smooth, matrix-like ‘nomadic spaces.'” Weizman goes on to explain that, “within these nomadic spaces,” Deleuze and Guattari “foresaw social organizations in a variety of polymorphous and diffuse operational networks,” and “organizations composed of a multiplicity of small groups that can split up or merge with one another depending on contingency and circumstances and are characterized by their capacity for adaptation and metamorphosis.” Naveh concurs:

Several of the concepts in [Deleuze & Guattari’s] A Thousand Plateau became instrumental for us [if the IDF]…allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a way that we could not have otherwise explained… Most important was the distinction Deleuze & Guattari have pointed out between the concepts of ‘smooth’ and ‘striated’ space [which accordingly reflected] the organizational concepts of the ‘war machine’ and the ‘state apparatus’. In the IDF we now often use the term ‘to smooth out space’ when we want to refer to operation in a space in such a manner that borders do not affect us. Palestinian areas could indeed be thought of as ‘striated’, in the sense that they are enclosed by fences, walls, ditches, road blocks and so on… We want to confront the ‘striated’ space of traditional, old-fashioned military practice with smoothness that allows for movement through space that crosses any borders and barriers. Rather than contain and organize our forces according to existing borders, we want to move through them (quoted in Weizman, 200-201, emphasis added).

As Weizman points out, “the Israeli military hardly needed Deleuze to attack Nablus.” Good thing, too, because Naveh clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It is nonsensical to pair “striated space” with the “state apparatus” on the Palestinian side, and “smooth space” with the “war machine” on the Israeli side. First and foremost, the Palestinians haven’t created or chosen their “striated space”: all of the “fences, walls, ditches, road blocks and so on” were built and imposed upon them by the Israelis. Second, Israeli space (that is to say, space in Israel “proper”) is in fact not “smooth,” but striated (like the typical capitalist city), and its architecture and urban design is, as we have seen, closely controlled by the “state apparatus” and not the nomadic tendencies of the “war machine.” Third and last, the precise thing that the Palestinians lack is a “state apparatus”: they have no homeland of their own and only partial autonomy in the Occupied Territories.

Indeed, if you are going to systematically commit crimes against humanity, you “need” nothing other than a reckless disregard for human life. Shimon Naveh reports that, during the March-April 2002 raids, “the [Israeli] military started thinking like criminals….like serial killers…like professional killers.” So why refer to Deleuze at all? Recall that Naveh said theory allowed the IDF to explain contemporary situations. Theory didn’t allow the IDF to fight, or to fight better, but to explain, to talk about fighting. Explain it to whom? To the IDF’s Palestinian victims? As in: “We can terrorize or kill you whenever and wherever we like”? Or perhaps to future war-crimes tribunals? As in: “The IDF wasn’t breaking the law, but merely borders and barriers”?

In any event, Eyal Weizman wasn’t fooled. On the one hand, he knows that 1) “theory” is “an instrument in the power struggles within the military itself,” “a new language with which it can challenge existing military doctrines, break apart ossified doxas and invert institutional hierarchies,” and a means for “the critique of the existing system, to argue for transformations and to call for further reorganizations”; 2) this “language” need not be expressed properly nor even understood by those who claim to speak it; this “language” need only be wholeheartedly embraced so as to exclude those who cannot or will not (allow themselves to) understand even little bits of it; and 3) “theory”—even if a great deal of it is enunciated from a Marxist perspective—can be used to sell the Occupation as the work of a “smart” military (smart bombs, smart theories), that is to say, a surgically precise and thus “more humane” military machine.

On the other hand, Weizman knows that 1) “claims for the ‘non-linearity’ and the ‘breakdown of vertical hierarchies’ in contemporary warfare are…largely exaggerated… Military networks are still largely nested within traditional institutional hierarchies, units are still given orders [from a central command], and follow plans and timelines”; 2) the “theory” cadre in the IDF was dealt a fatal set-back in spring 2006, when OTRI graduate Brigadier General Gal Hirsh was unable to defeat Hizbollah in Lebanon, which quickly led to the de-commissioning of the OTRI itself; and 3) the only measure of success in military operations is victory, and neither “theory,” “intelligence” reports, nor magic spells can guarantee it.

—-

This story first appeared (with footnotes) April 15 on the NOT BORED! website. NOT BORED! is an anarchist, Situationist-inspired xeroxed magazine from New York.

RESOURCES

Palestinians under Siege
London Review of Books, Dec. 14, 2000
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n24/said01_.html

Applied Research Institute—Jerusalem (ARIJ)
http://www.arij.org/

Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD)
http://www.icahd.org/

Planners for Planning Rights (Bimkom)
http://www.bimkom.org/

B’Tselem
http://www.btselem.org/

PDF of Weizman’s map
http://www.btselem.org/download/settlements_map_eng.pdf

From our daily report:

Israel plans Egypt border “fence”
WW4 Report, Feb. 6, 2008
/node/5052

Separation walls and the new security state: our readers write
WW4 Report, Oct. 28, 2007
/node/4601

Archaeology wars rage on at Temple Mount
WW4 Report, July 17, 2007
/node/4233

From our archive:

Israel bars new Palestinian wells in West Bank
WW4 Report, Nov. 4, 2002
/static/94.html#iraq8

——————-

Reprinted by World War 4 Report, May 1, 2008
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingMAPPING THE COMPLICITY OF ISRAELI ARCHITECTURE 

INTERVIEW: THE KING OF NUBIA

Sheikh Anwar McKeen on the Struggle in Sudan

from the Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade

In an historically prescient interview, Sudanese exile Sheikh Anwar McKeen, claimant to the throne of Nubia, and Dede Obombasa of the Coalition Against Slavery in Africa (CASIA), spoke over the airwaves of WBAI-New York on Jan. 9, 1996. Interviewed by Peter Lamborn Wilson and Bill Weinberg, co-hosts of the Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade, the two discussed the survival of slavery in Sudan and the Sahel, and Black African struggles for liberation and local autonomy.

Since 1996, the situations they discussed have changed in significant ways. The Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) laid down arms under a 2005 peace accord, and now has its own autonomous zone in the south of the country—hopefully putting an end to the slave trade there. However, nearly as a function of the peace accord in south, the west of country—Darfur—exploded. The Black African indigenous peoples there—the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa—perceived that there were no provisions in the accord for their autonomy, and took up arms. The government, through its proxies—the so-called Janjaweed militia—unleashed a campaign that many believe has constituted genocide, with perhaps two million displaced and 200,000 dead. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has now been officially charged with genocide by the International Criminal Court at The Hague.

In 1996, ten years before the world had heard of Darfur, Sheikh Anwar McKeen warned that the Fur—as well as his own people, the Nubians—were being deported as slaves, anticipating the current crisis. And slavery persists even now elsewhere in the Sahel, especially Mauritania.

The program opened with a musical selection brought by the Sheikh…

Bill Weinberg: We are in the studio tonight with Sheikh Anwar McKeen, king of Nubia, and an exiled activist from the land of Sudan; and Dede Obombasa of the Coalition Against Slavery in Africa (CASIA). They are here to speak about the terrifying re-emergence of the slave trade in this troubled part of the world. Sheikh McKeen, perhaps you can start by telling us something about the music we were just listening to.

Sheikh Anwar McKeen: Well, this is typical Sudanese music. Mohammed el Amin, who is singing, is one of what we call the Arabized Nubians…

Peter Lamborn Wilson: What does that mean, Arabic-speaking?

SAM: The Arabized people in Sudan are the indigenous people who have been indoctrinated for a very long time—since 1317 when the Arabs invaded the country. They began a process of Arabizing the indigenous people, they took their languages away from them, their culture. So now these Arabized peoples identify themselves with the Arabs.

BW: The civil war in Sudan appears to be along these very lines—between the Arabized peoples of the north and the more indigenous peoples of the south. So, you are of royal blood, you are a descendant of the kings of Nubia…

SAM: Yes, that’s right.

BW: And the last time Nubia was an independent kingdom was several centuries ago…

SAM: Yes, that was 1317, when the Arabs were expelled from Egypt under the Mamluk army, after it took over… So the Mamluks told the Arabs—who had been in Egypt about 700 years, since Amir ibn al-As opened Egypt in the early expansion of Islam—we don’t want you here. Because “Mamluk” means “slave soldiers”…

BW: Yes, they were the Turkish military slave caste that usurped power in Egypt.

SAM: Yes, the Arabs when they go to war, they recruit the war captives into the army to fight for them. That has been the mentality of the Arabs, to use their slaves to fight their wars.

So, when the Arabs tried to go back to the Arabian peninsula, they were told, You have spend 700 years integrating yourselves with the non-Arabs. So you don’t have the purity of Arab blood, so we don’t want you back. So find your way out. So they had no choice but to move southwards and invade Nubia. And they fought with our kings. They killed my forefather King Daoud.

So from that time, the royal line was kept secret. In fact, Daoud had four children, who escaped the land. One of the four children was Fazugli who went to the north and to Libya. The Fazani of Libya are the descendants of Fazugli. Another was Dulib, who went into the Sahara and found some mountains, and he went up there and hid himself. The elder brother was Kulib, and his sister Asah—they went to the west and followed the savanna until they reached Ghana.

Kulib left his sister there and went back to Sudan to see what happened to the Nubians. And he joined with the other Nubians who had fled the country and went to the west and hid themselves in the Nuba Mountains. So he stayed there with them. And he left his sister behind in Ghana, who founded the Ashante tribe of Ghana. They are the Ashante because they are the “people of Asah.” Even now in out language we say inte, which means “of.” So the Asah-nte means the people of Asah.

BW: So the Nubian nation was instrumental in the development of many subsequent empires in the African continent…

SAM: Yes, in fact the origins of all the Africans is from Nubia. In 8000 BC when the Nubian civilization spread all over the world, they also spread into the interior of Africa, establishing kingdoms and chieftains all over Africa until they covered the whole continent.

BW: But for the past several centuries before Sudanese independence, Nubia had been dominated by Egypt, which was in league with the Turks and then later with the British. And today it is ruled from Khartoum, Sudan’s capital…

PLW: What is the actual geographical relationship between Nubia and Sudan?

SAM: Well, it is one. You see, it used to be called the land of Kush.

PLW: From the Bible…

SAM: Yes. This was the land of Kush. Later it was known by other names. First it became Nubia, the land of gold. Nu means “gold.” It had that name for centuries until the Greeks came, and they called it Aithiopia, which means “black.” And then the Arabs when they came, they just translated the word aithiopia into Arabic, which is soudan. Sudan means “black.”

BW: And in fact Sudan was the first Black African country to achieve independence in the post-colonial era, in 1956. But today it is under the dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir, who came to power in a coup d’etat in 1989…

SAM: Yes, that’s right.

BW: Were you there at the time?

SAM: Yes, I was there.

BW: You were born and grew up in Sudan?

SAM: Yes, in Nubia. Then later, when the coup came, I was in Khartoum. I was the leader of a party, the Zinjarab National Cooperative Party.

BW: What does Zinjarab mean?

SAM: In our concept, we don’t identify all those who say that they are Arabs as Arabs. We say “Arabized.” The “Arab” exists only in their minds.

BW: Well, they are culturally Arabs, even if they are of African roots…

SAM: Well, partly. But the Sudanese folklore survives, and it has no relationship with the Arab folklore. Those who call themselves Arab—they cannot even get along with the Arabs when they go there [to Arabia]! They tell them they are not Arabs!

BW: So what does the Zinjarab National Cooperative Party stand for? What are its principles?

SAM: We believe people should co-exist peacefully and harmoniously. All the people who are in Sudan—it is their fate to live on that land. In our party we have Christians, we have Muslims, we have traditional believers. We believe that religion is a personal matter, it should not be involved in political life. Because every citizen in the country—being he or she a Muslim or a Christian or non-religious, or following the traditions of their ancestors—they all have the right to live!

BW: But the government of Omar Bashir reigns in the name of the National Salvation Revolutionary Council, which has resurrected Islamic law…

PLW: “Fundamentalism” is perhaps not an accurate word, but we can use it loosely to describe the regime, I think…

SAM: I don’t use the word fundamentalism. Because “fundamental” means going to the roots. If these people were fundamentalists, they would go to the roots of Islam. These are fanatic people, who are using religion to dominate and suppress other people. What they call the “jihad”—well, I am a scholar in Islam, and to me what this Omar Bashir and his Hazana tribe are doing in Sudan has nothing to do with Islam. It is not promoting Islam, but is destroying Islam. Because you can only declare jihad against somebody who fights you. If they agress on you, you declare jihad. And jihad can only be declared against a non-Muslim. But now, my people in the Nubia are Muslims. The Fur, in the far west, are Muslims. There is not even a single church in those regions—where they are declaring jihad on those people, on Muslims!

BW: So Sheikh McKeen, how did you come to leave your homeland?

SAM: Well in fact, I was not forced. It is just a providence of God. My people, we didn’t know what to do when Omar Bashir took over. They banned all the parties, so my people were thinking how to get me out of the country. None of the party leaders were allowed out. Those who were out, they couldn’t get back in; and those who were in couldn’t leave. But it happened that there was an invitation from New York to the Ministry of Religious Affairs to send Muslim scholars to come and attend a 40-day workshop on religious tolerance.

BW: This was when?

SAM: In 1992. They went around to all the Islamic groups, and they all said, we only have this Sheikh McKeen, who is well-versed in all the religions of the world, who can go and represent Sudan there. And then they came and looked for me, until they found me hiding myself somewhere! [Laughter]

And they got me out of there. I didn’t have a passport, but they arranged everything. So I came here with the minister of religious affairs. The government was concerned that I wouldn’t come back, so he was sent to bring me back with him. But before the conference finished, he was called back. So he said, Sheikh McKeen, what can I do now, I am called back. And I said, Brother, you go back to your government—you can lie to them or tell them the truth, or whatever. But me, I’m not going back.

PLW: Dede Obombasa, are you also from Nubia?

Dede Obombasa: I’m not from Nubia, I’m from the Lumbara people of central-east Africa. My people are scattered between three countries because of the partitioning of Africa. My village is in present-day Uganda, but the Lumbara people are also in Zaire and Sudan. I’ve spent some time in the Sudan.

PLW: Can you tell us a little about what brings you together with Sheikh McKeen…

BW: …and tell us a little about the work of the Coalition Against Slavery in Africa?

DO: Yes, of course, and I just want to tell you I’m very grateful to be here, because the main media have not taken interest in this issue. I was introduced to him, and on talking to him I just became instantly aware that I was speaking with a very unique African personality. Just his personality intrigued me and excited me. I am the president of CASIA.

PLW: This is a New York-based NGO?

DO: Yes absolutely, a New York-based nonprofit organization, a newly formed coalitional effort against slavery in Africa, and we are in support of the Sudanese and Mauritanian opposition movements.

PLW: I was just reading that slavery only disappeared from Mauritania in the 1960s, or… you would say it still hasn’t….

DO: Oh, it is very much there. You just speak to Mauritanians—now obviously, if you speak to the ones here in the embassy, they will say it does not exist. But if you speak to the African indigenous Mauritanians, slavery is very much a part of their daily lives. And Mauritanian slavery is actually a lot more sophisticated than the Sudanese one, which is actual chattel slavery, basically the abduction of women and children from African villages in Sudan…

PLW: …while Mauritania is more the traditional family retainer type of slavery.

DO: Yes, you have to go looking for certain characteristics—say, names. There are certain names that will clue you in that that person is either a current slave or is from a slave family. You look for occupations. African people in Mauritania are relegated to certain jobs. So you find these connections. And when you get to talk to these types of people and find out their personal history, you will find that they are in fact slaves. So this is what CASIA is trying to bring to the world’s attention.

PLW: Now do you get much response from the UN on this? Do you find that your message is heard? Do other NGOs take an interest, or are you crying in the wilderness?

DO: Well, as I was saying in the beginning, we feel like we are crying in the wilderness at this point. This is the second interview we have done on WBAI now, but as for the main media—they have not picked up this issue. As for the UN, you have the Sudanese representation that will meet us at the door. So we have not been able to get through our message. So we are crying in the wilderness, definitely.

PLW: I think the UN thinks it solved the problem 20 years ago. They said no slavery—so it’s no slavery…

DO: Yes, and on top of that, they say this is an in-country issue, and we’re not going to go and meddle in someone’s internal affairs. This is the argument that has been thrown at us.

BW: Who is profiting from slavery in Sudan and Mauritania? Slaves are being used in what industries, for what purposes?

DO: Slaves are being used for domestic labor. Slaves are used for agricultural labor. Slaves are used in both of these countries [in the agro-export sector]. African women are exchanged for such goods as camels, and given away as gifts. It is just the same situation that existed in the 16th, 17th century.

PLW: In Sudan these would be southern Sudanese who would fall into this situation…

DO: Yes…

SAM: Not necessarily southern Sudanese. Every indigenous person in Sudan is considered by the Arabs as a slave. In their culture, to own a slave is a kind of prestige.

PLW: Would they go so far as to enslave a Muslim?

DO and SAM: Yes!

SAM: Yes, of course they enslave Muslims. For example, we have two big religious houses in Sudan, the Mahadi house and the Margani house…

PLW: They are tarikas? Sufi orders?

SAM: Yes, they are kind of like sufis. The Margani [founder] came to Sudan as a major in the army under the Turks, and the Egyptians made him as a religious leader.

PLW: Well, you certainly couldn’t say that of the Mahdi…

SAM: No, he was made by the British!

PLW: Well, perhaps created, but then destroyed by the British! I mean, its a terrible story…

SAM: Yes, but Abdurahman Mahadi, the grandson, supported the English. Not the Mahdi. The first Mahdi fought the British, and he was killed.

PLW: …Along with 200,000 Sudanese.

SAM: Yes, in 1885.

BW: But he actually secured Sudanese independence from the Anglo-Egyptian empire for about ten years…

SAM: Well, we don’t consider that that was really independence. We have never felt any real independence so far.

PLW: Is there still a Mahadi organization? Does it have any power?

SAM: Yes, they are still there, and they are a powerful organization.

PLW: Well, surely they’re not “fundamentalist,” if I can use that word just for convenience. I mean, most sufis or sufi-influenced people would not be fundamentalist..

SAM: No, they are fundamentalist. And they own slaves. You go to the house of any of the children of Mahadi and you’ll find slaves. You go to the house of any children of Margani, you’ll find slaves.

PLW: Are they pure Arab, these families?

SAM: No, Margani is a Turk. The Mahdi was a Sudanese, a Nubian from the north. Of course, now they make claims. For instance, the last prime minister, Sadiq al-Mahdi, tried to trace himself to the Koreish [Bedouin tribe that controlled Mecca at the time of Mohammed]. Which is impossible. So they try to identify themselves as Arabs. But they never were.

BW: But still, the issue here is Arabized peoples of the north enslaving the more indigenous peoples of Sudan…

DO: Yes, they want to spread Islam to basically cover the whole of the African continent. They have a plan, I believe, to do this. One of the features of this slavery is that an African woman in the south, for example, whose village gets raided—she is abducted and raped, and if she gets pregnant, the child she produces from that rape is an Arab. And if that child grows up, becomes an adult, marries, the offspring of that child is an Arab.

BW: But would the child be born into slavery?

DO and SAM: Yes.

DO: But the child starts to trace his cultural identity now as an Arab. So that child might be used to go and fight the war, be drafted into the army, or that child might be used for menial labor.

BW: So it is continuing the tradition of slaves as a military caste…

DO: Yes! And it is to get rid of the African identity and African peoples in these ways.

SAM: You know, there is a hidden agenda. The Arabs dream of a worldwide empire. They have divided the lands into three [categories]. There is Dar al-Islam, which means where Islam prevails. And then Dar al-Harb, which means the abode of war. So they want to go to war anywhere there is no Islam, and justify their terrorism—although Islam is not a terrorist religion… And then there is Dar al-Aman, the abode of peace. The abode of peace is Africa. So according to their belief, in order to invade the rest of the world, they have to change all Africa…

PLW: Is anybody officially backing the Sudanese at this point?

SAM: Iran and Iraq.

PLW: Oh, both! [Laughter]

SAM: Yes, both of them. And this [Sudanese Islamist leader] Hassan al-Turabi, who claims himself to be the imam of the Muslims all over the world—he said just recently that Sudan has been chosen by God to save the world from atheism, and they will fight anywhere. They will first take Africa. He says Africa has no civilization, so we are going to introduce civilization to the Africans!

BW: Well Sheikh McKeen, let me ask you—what would be the place of Arabs in the multicultural Sudan that your Zinjarab National Cooperative Party would like to see.

SAM: Well, in fact there are no Arabs in Sudan. We have only a few Arabs in the east, who we call the Bediyya. We don’t have anything against them; they are not involved in politics. But these Arabized peoples who are backed by the Arabs in the Arab lands—they are the ones who enslaving us, and are Arabizing us. If you tell them you don’t want to become an Arab, they tell you you are against Islam!

PLW: So they’re doing all this in the name of sharia, in the name of pure or as you might say “fundamental” Islam… This is their ideology…

SAM: This is their ideology. They do it in the name of Islam, but it has nothing to do with Islam. This is politics.

BW: Cotton has been the big crop Sudan has been promoting in recent years as its lifeline into the world economy. Are there slaves working on the cotton plantations of Sudan?

SAM: Yes. You see, in the Gazeera bowl, where the greatest cotton plantation was, those who work on the land—all of them are slaves. Brought from the south, from the Nuba mountains, the Fur people from the far west… They are the ones working on the plantations.

PLW: Which people? The Fur…?

DO: Yes, the Fur. They are a Black African people. Most of the Black Africans are in the south, but there are big Black African populations in the Nuba Mountains in the north, and in the west. And they are the ones you will find working on this Gazeera scheme, which was a very ambitious cotton-growing scheme.

BW: Now this was one of those big state-sponsored development schemes…

DO: Yes, and it has not worked out the way it was supposed to. But the people you’ll find there have black skin like me. They will be women and children of African descent, picking cotton.

BW: And they’re being kept there against their will, and they’re not receiving any wage…

DO: They are slaves. They are owned by somebody, and they are there to work, and what the receive for their work are the meals they might manage to get in the evening.

BW: Who would they be owned by, if they’re working in this big, centralized state-supported plantation?

DO: They would be owned by the Arabized Sudanese who leased them out, in exchange for whatever the contract called for with the plantation owners.

One situation you’ll find frequently in the north is an Arabized person holding a couple of African people and then hoping to sell them back to their relatives who come looking for them, at a certain price. It is a big profit thing. It is commerce.

BW: And the plantations are owned by large land-owners who are favored by the state, and got the land under this development project?

DO: Yes, that kind of thing. As I said, the Gazeera scheme has not been functioning the way it was supposed to, and certain pieces of it have fallen apart, because of the civil war and so on. But that would be the type of arrangement.

BW: OK, how do either of you view the civil war? How do you view the SPLA, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, the guerilla group in the south which is fighting against the government?

DO: The thing that is missing from most of these interviews and arguments is the voice of women. And obviously I am not here to pose myself as their representative, but I am speaking as an African woman. The SPLA is obviously trying to fight for the independence of the south. They have come to believe that the marriage of the north and the south has not worked—that lumping together of totally different peoples. How the British thought that alliance would work is a mystery.

PLW: It’s the great African mystery in general…

DO: Absolutely. I’m not a politician, so Im not speaking as an expert on this. But the SPLA believes the best solution now would be to separate from the north, and they are trying to negotiate a political settlement for that, so that African people can have self-determination in the south and be in governance of their own affairs. That’s what they’re trying to do, and I’m definitely in support of that.

PLW: So you’ve given up on the idea of a united Sudan, in other words. Would you say the same thing, Sheikh McKeen?

SAM: No. No, I don’t buy that idea of dividing the Sudan. You see, I am against the separation because once we the Blacks in Sudan say that we want to have our own place, we have given a big part of Sudan to the Arabs.

PLW: To the Khartoum regime…

SAM: To the Khartoum regime. And this is what some in the regime want! Even this Turabi wanted to separate the country because he said they’re giving us headaches! Some think they can organize themselves better without the south to penetrate all over Africa.

BW: So how do you view the SPLA, Sheikh McKeen?

SAM: I say that if the SPLA really wants to free the Sudan, they should fight in Khartoum and in the north. Because the land that has been taken by the Arabs has to be claimed back. The south belongs to us. The Nuba Mountains belong to us. The far west belongs to us. But we have lost the land in the North. We have to fight there.

PLW: Do you think that in Africa in general, one should fight for boundaries that as you have said yourself were imposed by former colonial regimes? Or do you think there could be a more intelligent rearranging of borders? And would that be possible without going against the ideals that you’ve expressed for solidarity of peoples?

SAM: Yes, I believe that Africans are one people. And these political boundaries which were made somewhere in Berlin—just putting the map of Africa on a table like a cake and giving a piece to everyone who wants it—this has divided the African people. As Dede said, her Lugbara are divided into three countries—Zaire, Sudan and Uganda.

PLW: Or people who don’t like each other are squashed together…

SAM: So I think if the Africans unite, they should rearrange these borders.

PLW: On tribal grounds? On religious grounds? That opens another whole set of problems. I think a federation of small organic states is probably the way to go. At least, I’ll suggest this…

SAM: Yes—after the unity of Africa. But now we don’t want more major divisions in Africa. Because it would cause another generation of war.

PLW: So you would defend existing boundaries simply as a defense against chaos and war.

SAM: Yes, until we organize ourselves.

I want to elaborate a little on the relationship between the master and the slave. The two big houses, the Margani and Mahadi, they divided Sudan into two. The Mahadi claim the West and the Nuba Mountains and the South. The Margani claim to have the rest of the North, and the East. So, the people on their lands—they will work the whole year, and gather the crops. They will either take the whole crop to their masters, or sell it and take the money to their masters. So it has been practiced since a long time ago.

Once I want to the house of someone in the East, in a place called Gadara, and he called it “my master’s house.” I said, “This is your house.” He said, “No, if my master comes he can take it any time.”

The people in the West who are the followers of the Mahadi, we call them the Baggara—they will deny their children any kind of food, clothing, education, medication, and collect all the crop and sell it and take [the proceeds] to their master in Omdurman, in Khartoum. So these two big houses have become very rich.

PLW: Would you say they are the true rulers?

SAM: Sometimes one is in power, sometimes the other, and then there is a military coup d’etat.

PLW: And what is their relationship with the present regime? Do they support it?

SAM: No, they are in opposition. But they compromise to get along. For instance, this Sadiq al-Mahdi, who says he is against this government—Turabi is married to his sister! So you may find them fighting in front of us, but in the evening you’ll find them taking coffee together! [Laughter]

BW: Dede, I wonder if you could elaborate on the point you made earlier about how the voice of African women is left out of the debate. What perspectives are not getting across in terms of these questions of ethnic conflict and boundaries?

DO: There are very few African women who are in the political arena, in the place where decisions are made. This is going to effect people’s lives economically, socially and so on. African women are marginalized at best, or completely left out.

In regard to the particular issue we are discussing tonight—a lot of the men have now joined the liberation movements, including the SPLA. They’ve gone off to fight. So the villages are left with women, children and the elderly. So when these villages get bombarded, when the Arab soldiers come marauding and killing and pillaging and plundering, who do they find in these villages? They find these women. These women don’t have guns to shoot back. So they get abducted and shipped off to the North and sold as domestic servants and so on.

So my stance is that the political decisions that are made have got to start including women’s voices. Because women’s experiences of all these civil wars that are going on is very different. I’m not saying their pain is more intense. They just experience it differently.

You will find that the displacement camps in Sudan are full of women. Sometimes their children have been taken away. Sometimes they are pregnant from these rapes, and they are traumatized emotionally and wanting to kill themselves. Some of them have just gone ahead and committed suicide.

It is because of women’s general experience of being left out of the decision-making process that events are happening around them that are impacting their lives in very traumatic ways. And they are not in control of—How did this happen? Why am I at this point? Why is someone shooting at me and I’m unable to defend myself?

Sudanese women are coming to the US now as part of the resettlement, and I’m sure many of the will be speaking about their experience in Sudan—about being separated from their mother, or a mother talking about her two little girls having been taken and she’s never seen them again. I heard one story of a mother who went looking for her two little girls who had been abducted, and managed to find one, and managed to find some way of getting that child back. So it is that kind of experience that I was trying to touch on.

PLW: What is CASIA’s approach to bringing attention to these issues? Political organizing, cultural work, information pure and simple…?

DO: All of those things, because they all go together. Right now, CASIA is supporting the Sudanese and Mauritanian opposition movements, and helping to get the word out. Getting the word out is the most important thing right now, because like I said we are crying in the forest and nobody is listening to us.

PLW: Do you feel the UN is at all open? For example, at the recent women’s meeting in Beijing—do you feel anyone there was representing your voice?

DO: Unfortunately, not. I met a woman who actually was there in Beijing. And she ran into some Sudanese women who had been sent there by the government—southern Sudanese women!

BW: To sort of whitewash the situation…

DO: Absolutely! Of course they would do that! So there were no southern women there representing our view. And it is interesting that there was a similar situation happening with women from Tibet. The Chinese government allowed the Tibetans to put on this big, elaborate show—Tibetan culture, Tibetan art and so on.

BW: But only the Tibetan voices approved by the Chinese state…

DO: Exactly. So no, our voices were not represented in Beijing.

BW: Another issue you don’t hear much about which is extremely vital in this part of the world is that of control of water. Certainly, the Sahara is spreading, and the ecological decline is related to the war and indigenous peoples being pushed from their lands. And I understand that Egypt’s interest in controlling this region is related to securing access to the headwaters of the Nile.

SAM: Yes, the Egyptians control the Nile water. It is a very old agreement with the Sudan from the time of the British. And that agreement has not been changed until today. We have access to only 18% of the Nile’s water, and Egypt has the rest. And that is why the governments [of Sudan] have been unable to divert enough of the water for irrigation. Even now, if you live on the Nile and you want to put in a new pump to water your land, you have to get approval from the Egyptian government.

BW: What about the Aswan Dam? I understand that had a big effect on the Nubian people.

SAM: Yes, it did. It displaced many Nubians from the North. Several villages from the area around Aswan were deported and taken to the East. They were resettled there by force. They didn’t like the East, because they are not used to that climate and that environment.

DO: And the dam has also brought in diseases that weren’t there before. It has caused an ecological imbalance.

SAM: So even though this land is on the Egyptian side of the border, it flooded a lot of land in Sudan as well.

DO: Yes, and actually the politics of control of the Nile extends all the way to Uganda, because the Nile comes out of Uganda. The question of the Nile and who has money and power and technology to control it is a whole other subject! We could spend another hour on it!

PLW: And we only have thirty seconds left… But this has been so interesting, I really think we should have both of you back again.

SAM: Well we are here, available any time. And in fact, we have not said much!

PLW: Yes, an hour is hardly anything. There are so many more topics. I wanted to ask you how you got such a good Scottish name as McKeen! [Laughter]

SAM: Well, in fact I am asking, where did the Scots get this McKeen! [More laughter] Because the Nubians had this Mckeen a long time ago. Mac means “chief” in Nubian.

PLW: Ah, there must be a relation with the Celtic people! [More laughter]

BW: Well this has been really fascinating. Dede Obombasa of CASIA, and Sheikh Anwar McKeen, king of Nubia, thank you so much for joining us. And until next time—Salaam Aleikum!

DO and SAM: Aleikum Salaam!

—-
Resources:

Rescue Nubia
http://www.rescuenubia.org

Nuba Survival
http://www.nubasurvival.com

Save Darfur
http://www.savedarfur.org

African Liberation Forces of Mauritania (FLAM)
http://flamnet.fr.fm

Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade
http://www.morc.info

From our daily report:

International Criminal Court charges Sudan’s al-Bashir with genocide
World War 4 Report, July 12, 2010

International lines drawn in Sudan war crimes warrant
World War 4 Report, March 13, 2009

Miserriya Arab nomads new pawns in struggle for Sudan
World War 4 Report, March 25, 2008

Sudan: peace deal imminent with Eastern Front?
World War 4 Report, Oct. 10, 2006

See also:

DARFUR: THE SHOCK OF RESPONSIBILITY
Al-Bashir and the International Criminal Court
by Rene Wadlow, Toward Freedom
World War 4 Report, May 2009

MAURITANIA: WILL NEW ANTI-SLAVERY LAW BE ENOUGH?
from IRIN
World War 4 Report, September 2007

——————-

Special to World War 4 Report, August 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingINTERVIEW: THE KING OF NUBIA 

OIL SHOCK REDUX

Is OPEC the Real Cartel —or the Transnationals?

by Vilosh Vinograd, WW4 Report

At its Vienna summit, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) decided Feb. 1 against pumping more oil—in an open rebuff to Washington at a time when fears of a world economic downturn are adding to concern over rising prices. In defense of its decision, the 13-nation cartel said that global supplies are adequate and that speculation and geopolitical jitters—not oil availability—are setting prices. It also actually cited the impending downturn as a reason to put less oil on the market. “In view of the current situation, coupled with the projected economic slowdown…current OPEC production is sufficient to meet expected demand for the first quarter of the year,” read the official statement from the summit.

OPEC president Chakib Khelil of Algeria told reporters that US economic conditions “will probably have some impact on demand.” In the prelude to the summit, Iran’s oil minister, Gholam Hussein Nozari, told reporters: “we think there should be cutting in production.”

President Bush, meanwhile, led the lobbying for an output increase. “Everyone is fully aware that having a reliable and steady and predictable supply of oil is a benefit to the global economy,” said White House spokesman Tony Fratto in response to OPEC’s announcement. “We hope that they understand that their decisions on oil production have a real impact on the economy,” he said.

Including Iraq, which is not under quotas, total OPEC output is estimated at about 31.5 million barrels a day—about 40% of daily world demand, believed to be around 85.5 million barrels. The formal “OPEC-12” (minus Iraq) output ceiling is around 30 million barrels a day. (AP, Feb. 1)

Oil prices hit a symbolically cataclysmic $100 a barrel over the new year, and Bloomberg wrote that the “fastest-growing bet” on the New York Mercantile Exchange in is that the price of crude will double to $200 a barrel by the end of the year.

Petroleum prices have tripled over the last five years, with gasoline prices reaching record heights last summer. But for all the hand-wringing and exhortations to OPEC, these are unprecedentedly good times for the transnational oil companies.

ExxonMobil, the world’s largest publicly listed company, has reported a record-breaking $40.6 billion in net profits for 2007—up from $39.5 billion in 2006, which was the largest annual profit for any US company in history. (Money Times, Feb. 3)

Geopolitics, not Geology

The theorists of “Peak Oil” foresee an imminent end to the exorbitant profits and petroleum profligacy on which North American society is predicated. It is true that Exxon’s profits in the third quarter last year were 10% lower than the same period a year earlier—which was attributed to rising prices at the gas pump finally taking an impact on consumption.

It is also true that the remaining new fields that the majors are finding are are in hard-to-reach places—like the bottom of the sea, where drilling and pumping costs far more than it does on land.

But the most significant reality is that the oil fields the transnationals do control account for only about 6% of the world’s known reserves. State-owned companies such as Saudi Aramco and the National Iranian Oil Company have the rest—and, with oil costs above $90 a barrel, they are increasingly independent of investment from the globe-spanning majors. (SF Chronicle, Feb. 1)

Only 34% of global production is directly controlled by the trans-nationals, and terms for the exploitation of state-owned resources have been getting less favorable for the last generation. As Le Monde Diplomatique noted last March:

Under the traditional concession, companies owned the oil fields. But since the 1970s that model has disappeared outside the United States and a few European countries such as Britain, the Netherlands and Norway. Elsewhere, in Colombia, Thailand and the Gulf, the last contracts that granted concessions before the great wave of nationalisations during the 1970s have ended or are about to end. In Abu Dhabi, the authorities have already notified the majors that three concessions, due to expire in 2014 and 2018, will not be renewed.

And the state oil companies are generally only accepting the trans-nationals as 40% partners. The most significant reversal of this trend would be the Iraq oil law, which would open the country’s undeveloped fields (the big majority) to private investment on favorable terms. But, as Le Monde notes, Washington committed a “miscalculation” in thinking it could easily push this through Iraq’s parliament: “[T]he US had no difficulty in rewriting the occupied country’s constitution to suit itself, but all its attempts to overturn the 1972 law that nationalised oil and revert to a system of concessions have so far failed.”

ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips abandoned their heavy crude oil projects in Venezuela’s Orinoco Belt last year rather than cede majority ownership and operating control to the state-owned oil company PDVSA.

In an editorial in its Jan. 5 issue—just as oil was hitting $100 a barrel—The Economist wrote, “Oil keeps getting more expensive—but not because it is running out.” Instead, the magazine which is considered sacred guardian of the neoliberal order blamed “peak nationalism.”

“Oil is now almost five times more expensive than it was at the beginning of 2002,” The Economist noted.

It would be natural to assume that ever increasing price reflects ever greater scarcity. And so it does, in a sense. Booming bits of the world, such as China, India and the Middle East have seen demand for oil grow with their economies. Meanwhile, Western oil firms, in particular, are struggling to produce any more of the stuff than they did two or three years ago. That has left little spare production capacity and, in America at least, dwindling stocks. Every time a tempest brews in the Gulf of Mexico or dark clouds appear on the political horizon in the Middle East, jittery markets have pushed prices higher. This week, it was a cold snap in America and turmoil in Nigeria that helped the price reach three figures.

No wonder, then, that the phrase “peak oil” has been gaining ground even faster than the oil price. With each extra dollar, the conviction grows that the planet has been wrung dry and will never be able to satisfy the thirst of a busy world.

But The Economist places the blame with “geography, not geology.”

Yet the fact that not enough oil is coming out of the ground does not mean not enough of it is there… For one thing, oil producers have tied their own hands. During the 1980s and 1990s, when the price was low and so were profits, they pared back hiring and investment to a minimum. Many ancillary firms that built rigs or collected seismic data shut up shop. Now oil firms want to increase their output again, they do not have the staff or equipment they need.

Worse, nowadays, new oil tends to be found in relatively inaccessible spots or in more unwieldy forms. That adds to the cost of extracting oil, because more engineers and more complex machinery are needed to exploit it—but the end of easy oil is a far remove from the jeremiads of peak-oilers. The gooey tar-sands of Canada contain almost as much oil as Saudi Arabia. Eventually, universities will churn out more geologists and shipyards more offshore platforms, though it will take a long time to make up for two decades of underinvestment.

Finally, The Economist cuts to the chase—revealing that the real answer lies in neither geology nor geography, but geopolitics:

The biggest impediment is political. Governments in almost all oil-rich countries, from Ecuador to Kazakhstan, are trying to win a greater share of the industry’s bumper profits. That is natural enough, but they often deter private investment or exclude it altogether. The world’s oil supply would increase markedly if Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell had freer access to Russia, Venezuela and Iran. In short, the world is facing not peak oil, but a pinnacle of nationalism.

So The Economist backs up the conventional wisdom that the oil majors want what is best for humanity, that consumer needs are best served by the “free (read: unregulated) market,” and that the roots of the crisis lie with efforts by countries in the global south to reclaim sovereign control over the resources under their own soil.

This is, of course, a recipe for endless war. Not only is rolling back the wave of oil nationalizations a long-standing goal of the transnationals and their allies going back at least to the CIA-backed Iranian coup of 1953, but there are pressing geostrategic concerns related to the long-term preservation of US global hegemony.

As far back as 1992, the Pentagon “Defense Planning Guide” drawn up by Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby stated that the US must “discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” The oil resources of the Persian Gulf were recognized as critical to this aim: “In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve US and Western access to the region’s oil.”

In this light, the fact that Beijing’s national company PetroChina is rapidly gaining on Exxon as the world’s largest oil company takes on a significance far beyond mere commercial competition. “Access to oil” ultimately means access to military power, so what is really at issue here is control of oil as a key to global power.

Last November, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, after meeting in Beijing with his counterpart, Gen. Cao Gangchuan, told a news conference he had raised “the uncertainty over China’s military modernization and the need for greater transparency to allay international concerns.” In its coverage of the meeting, the New York Times precisely echoed the language of the 1992 Defense Planning Guide: “Pentagon officials describe China as a ‘peer competitor’…” An analysis on the visit in the newspaper quoted Michael J. Green of the Center for Strategic and International Studies saying, “If you are sitting in the Pentagon, China is a potential peer competitor.”

Understand this, and the reckless, criminal adventure in Iraq becomes at least comprehensible. So does the war drive against Iran, whose growing sway over the Shi’ite-dominated Baghdad regime could render the US “victory” in Iraq horrifically Phyrric. So too becomes the mutual Sudan-Chad proxy war—in which a government with PetroChina contracts and one with Exxon contracts sponsor guerilla movements on each others’ territory. The destabilization campaign against the Hugo Chávez regime in Venezuela comes into focus as a struggle over ancillary but still globally significant oil reserves in the traditional US “backyard.” The popular notion that the West’s contest with OPEC is fundamentally about securing low oil prices on behalf of consumers dematerializes like a mirage.

Oil industry insiders understand that there is actually a strong tendency in exactly the other direction. OPEC needs to keep prices under control to assure their dominance of “market share,” while Western governments and transnationals need high prices in order to line up the investment and political will to expand production to areas beyond OPEC’s control—from Alaska to the Caspian Basin.

The Public Strikes Back?

There are signs of a public backlash to the oil majors’ free ride now that the Bush administration enters its endgame. The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights is calling for Congressional action to bring unregulated energy markets under public control. “Exxon is making more than $75,000 a minute around the clock on crude oil prices that are at unjustifiable levels,” read their press release. “Oil companies have opposed legislation to regulate electronic energy trading, even as they deflect blame by pointing to such markets as the reason for crude oil prices that remain above $90 a barrel… Exxon’s $40.6 billion annual profit and Chevron’s $17.1 billion come at the cost of an economy tipping into recession… While Exxon makes the largest corporate profit by any corporation, ever, families pay $60 and more for a gas station fill-up and Northeasterners are shelling out more than $2,000 on average for heating oil.”

“The 2007 profit of just the three U.S.-based major oil companies comes to $70 billion,” said FTCR research director Judy Dugan, research director of the nonprofit, nonpartisan FTCR. “Yet Americans are deeper in consumer debt than ever in large part for high energy costs.” (FTCR, Feb. 1)

Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen, wrote in a September 2006 report, “Hot Profits and Global Warming: How Oil Companies Hurt Consumers and the Environment”:

The high prices we are now paying are simply feeding oil company profits and are not being invested in sustainable energy solutions. Since January 2005, the largest five oil companies—ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips—spent $112 billion buying back their own stock and paying dividends, and have an extra $59.5 billion in cash, while their investment in renewable energy pales in comparison. For example, BP, the so-called renewable energy leader, in 2005 posted $38.4 billion in stock buybacks, dividend payments and cash, but plans to invest two percent of that amount on solar, wind, natural gas and hydrogen energy.

And this despite an aggressive ad campaign emphasizing BP’s supposed commitment to renewable energy, a new logo that looks like a pretty green flower, and the dropping of the word “petroleum” from all advertising—except for the catch-phrase “beyond petroleum.” Of course, BP remains fundamentally an oil company, and still officially stands for British Petroleum. In fact, Public Citizen finds, the oil majors are doing their best to keep alternativesoff the market:

Under the current market framework, oil companies aren’t making the investments necessary to solve our addiction to oil and never will. With $1 trillion in assets tied up in extracting, refining and marketing oil, their business model will squeeze the last cent of profit out of that sunk capital for as long as possible. The oil industry’s significant presence on Capitol Hill ensures that the government does not threaten their monopoly over energy supply through funding of alternatives to oil. For example, energy legislation signed by President Bush in August 2005 provides $5 billion in new financial subsidies to oil companies.

And FTCR’s Dugan says the 2007 energy bill didn’t do much better, failing to include any provision to recoup some $14 billion in oil company tax subsidies over five years. “The major oil companies’ incredible profits, boosted by multibillion-dollar tax subsidies to the industry, are ultimately clobbering taxpayers,” she said Dugan. “Given the rising federal debt, today’s babies will still be paying the Exxon tab.”

Iraq and the GWOT: It’s the Oil, Stupid!

Bush may have been sincere in his exhortations to OPEC to boost production and thereby lower prices. High prices may now be costing the administration and its oil industry friends more than is deemed acceptable. But in any case, the fundamental thing at this stage of the game is no longer the price of oil but control of oil. Mohammed Mossadeq’s nationalization of Iran’s oil in 1952 was the first major assault on Western control of oil. It was turned around with the following year’s CIA coup. The 1956 Suez crisis briefly interrupted oil flows from the Middle East and affected prices, but posed no challenge to Western control. The founding of OPEC in 1960 was a first step towards reasserting sovereign control of oil, but the fields still largely remained in private Western hands even if host governments would now dictate production levels in a coordinated manner so as to influence prices.

The 1969 coup d’etat in Libya brought the radical Col. Moammar Qadaffi to power and led to first the nationalization of Libya’s oil and then the imposition of production-sharing agreements on terms favorable to the host government. Analyst James Akins writing in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the elite Council on Foreign Relations, called the Libyan demands of 1970 “a flash of lightening in a summer sky.” But far worse was yet to come with the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

As Israel’s tanks rolled into the Sinai, Iraq nationalized the Exxon and Mobil holdings in the Basra oil fields and launched a drive for a full Arab embargo of the US. “Radical” regimes like Iraq and Libya won over “conservative” ones like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf mini-states. The Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), an independent body within OPEC, was formed—and the embargo was on. In December, the price shot up to a then-unprecedented $11.65 per barrel (not adjusted for inflation)—an increase of 468% over the price in 1970. For the first time, producing nations had used the “oil weapon” as a lever of influence against the West. The first “oil shock”—then known as the “energy crisis”—was a wake-up call for consumers, governments and transnationals alike.

Then, as now, oil company profits went through the roof. As long lines formed at gas stations across the USA, Exxon’s profits went up 29%; Mobil’s 22%; and Texaco’s 23%. But fearing loss of control, the transnationals pressured the White House to cede to Arab demands. The major shareholders in Aramco (the Saudi-based Arabian American Oil Company, then consisting of Exxon, Mobil, Texaco and Chevron) sent a memorandum to President Nixon warning of dire consequences if the US did not halt aid to Israel.

While demonization of the Arabs was widespread in the US media, the oil companies were also a target of public ire. In 1974, executives were called to testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, where James Allen, Democrat of Alabama, posed the question: “Would it be improper to ask if the oil companies are enjoying a feast in the midst of famine?” Litigation was also launched against the oil majors, but they had made little progress when OPEC decided to boost production again in 1975, leveling off prices—the war now long over, and maintenance of market share emerging as an imperative in response to Capitol Hill talk of “energy independence.”

The US Strategic Reserves and UN International Energy Agency were established in response to the crisis. But these measures failed to prevent the next “oil shock” when the Iranian Revolution toppled the Shah in 1979. The price per barrel more than doubled between 1979 and 1981, and prices at the pump jumped 150%. The combined net earnings of Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Gulf and Texaco increased by 70% between 1978 and 1979, while 1980 was the most lucrative year in the oil industry’s history up to that point. The US and its Gulf allies gave former rival Iraq a “green light” to invade Iran and cut the ayatollahs down to size.

In the Reagan-era Pax Americana, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states kept the price low so as to undermine the struggling Iranian regime. But now even conservative allies of the West were asserting oil sovereignty. 1980 saw the Saudi regime’s nationalization of Aramco—a tipping point in fast-eroding Western control of global oil.

The subsequent generation was one of both retreat and consolidation for the transnationals. Even as their control over global oil contracted, they retrenched their forces internally. The “Seven Sisters” of the 1970s (Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Gulf, Texaco, BP and Shell, by their contemporary names) are now four, following the mergers of Mobil with Exxon, and Gulf and Texaco with Chevron—or perhaps five, if we consider ConocoPhillips as having joined their ranks.

Oil prices dropped in the weeks after 9-11, even as theories mounted that the US invasion of Afghanistan was aimed at encircling the Caspian Basin oil reserves. But some observers recognized even then that the real struggle was over the Persian Gulf reserves, the most strategic on the planet by far. On Oct. 18, 2001, Michael Klare wrote in The Nation:

The geopolitical dimensions of the war are somewhat hard to discern because the initial fighting is taking place in Afghanistan, a place of little intrinsic interest to the United States, and because our principal adversary, bin Laden, has no apparent interest in material concerns. But this is deceptive, because the true center of the conflict is Saudi Arabia, not Afghanistan (or Palestine), and because bin Laden’s ultimate objectives include the imposition of a new Saudi government, which in turn would control the single most valuable geopolitical prize on the face of the earth: Saudi Arabia’s vast oil deposits, representing one-fourth of the world’s known petroleum reserves.

Klare stated, rather obviously: “A Saudi regime controlled by Osama bin Laden could be expected to sever all ties with US oil companies and to adopt new policies regarding the production of oil and the distribution of the country’s oil wealth—moves that would have potentially devastating consequences for the US, and indeed the world, economy. The United States, of course, is fighting to prevent this from happening.”

With the invasion of Iraq—which sits on nearly half the Persian Gulf reserves—it was correctly perceived that the struggle for the planet’s most critical reserves was truly underway, and the third oil shock arrived. The price has escalated along with the level of insurgent violence ever since. The Great Fear driving the prices ever higher is that the US could lose control of Iraq, the conflagration could generally engulf the Middle East, and that Iran or jihadist elements far more intransigent than Saddam Hussein could emerge as new masters of the Gulf reserves.

An effective anti-war position must entail deconstructing the propaganda of “national security” on the oil question, and breaking with the illusion that elite concerns and consumer concerns coincide. Iraq and its various “sideshows” such as Afghanistan are the battlegrounds in a strategic struggle for control of oil as the foundation of continued US global dominance (or “primacy,” in the argot of wonkdom). This struggle will not mean lower oil prices for US citizens—but their sons and daughters dying on foreign shores, fueling Islamist terrorism and hatred of the US in a relentless vicious cycle.

—-

RESOURCES

Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights
http://www.consumerwatchdog.org

FTCR press release via
Fox Business, Feb. 1

Public Citizen Energy Program
http://www.citizen.org/cmep

OPEC: No boost in oil output
AP, Feb. 1

Exxon gains from Soaring Oil Prices, beats own Record
Money Times, Feb. 3

Big Oil has trouble finding new fields
San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 1

The oil price: Peak nationalism
The Economist, Jan. 3

Hydrocarbon Nationalism
by Jean-Pierre Séréni
Le Monde Diplomatique, March 2007

The Geopolitics of War
by Michael Klare
The Nation, Oct. 18, 2001

See also:

IRAQ: EXPOSING THE CORPORATE AGENDA
by Antonia Juhasz, Oil Change International
WW4 Report, November 2007
/node/4611

PEAK OIL AND NATIONAL SECURITY
A Critique of Energy Alternatives
by George Caffentzis
WW4 Report, September 2005
/node/1027

From our weblog:

Oil: $200 a barrel by year’s end?
WW4 Report, Jan. 27, 2008
/node/4986

China emerges as “peer competitor” —in race for global oil
WW4 Report, Nov. 8, 2007
/node/4649

Consumers get revenge on Exxon …a little
WW4 Report, Nov 2, 2007
/node/4621

Specter of “hydrocarbon nationalism” drives Iraq war
WW4 Report, March 27, 2007
/node/3453

Exxon quits Venezuela
WW4 Report, June 27, 2007
/node/4136

From our archive:

Petro-oligarchs wage shadow war
WW4 Report, Dec. 22, 2001
/static/13.html#shadows2

——————-

Special to World War 4 Report, Feb. 1, 2008
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingOIL SHOCK REDUX