THE PETROLEUM COMMONS: Local, Islamic, and Global

by George Caffentzis

1. All land and natural resources (including mineral resources) within the Ijaw territory belong to Ijaw communities and are the basis of our survival.

2. We cease to recognise all undemocratic decrees that rob our peoples/communities of the right to ownership and control of our lives and resources, which were enacted without our participation and dissent. These include the Land Use Decree and The Petroleum Decree, etc.

–The Kaiama Declaration (December 1998)

Introduction: Oil and Water

The struggles over the ownership of the two most important political liquids of this era, petroleum and water, have had different fates. Though water has been claimed to be either private, state or common property throughout history, the novel feature of this neoliberal period has been the move by corporations to totally privatize it. The powerful struggles against this corporate privatization of water from Cochabamba in Bolivia to Soweto in South Africa have focused world attention on the question: Who owns water? The consequent efforts to keep water as a common property on a local and global level are now some of the most important initiatives of the anti-globalization movement.

Petroleum, on the other hand, has in the last hundred and fifty years been considered exclusively as either private or state property. The pages of the history books on the petroleum industry have been filled with “magnates” like John D. Rockefeller or government “leaders” like Saddam Hussain and Winston Churchill. Thus the “struggle over oil” has been largely seen as a struggle between oil companies and governments, since its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century.

But over the last fifteen years there has been a major shift in the physiognomy of the protagonists in the oil struggle. No longer do national governments and huge energy conglomerates dominate the scene so exclusively. The new protagonists include: “peoples” like the Ijaws, the Ogoni, the Chiapanacos, the U’wa, the Cofan, the Secoyas, the Huaorani, the Sumatrans; border-transcending social movements under the star of Islam and subscribing to “Islamic economics”; elements of the UN system like the World Bank, claiming to represent “global governance” of the “global commons.” These peoples, movements and global entities have entered into the struggle for the control of oil production, legitimizing themselves with a new (and yet, at the same time, quite archaic) conception of property–common property.

Why is the notion of a petroleum commons emerging now, and what are its consequences for the oil industry?

There are three levels of claims to petroleum as common property, correlating with three kinds of allied communities that are now taking shape, for there is no common property without a community that regulates its use:

*First, some local communities most directly affected by the extraction of petroleum claim to own and regulate the petroleum under its territory as a commons

*Second, Islamic economists claim for the Islamic community of believers, from Morocco to Indonesia, and its representative, the 21st century Caliphate in formation, ownership of and the right to regulate the huge petroleum fields beneath their vast territory.

*Third, UN officials claim for the “coming global community” the right to regulate the so-called global commons–air, water, land, minerals (including petroleum) and “nous” (knowledge and information). This imagined global community is to be represented by a dizzying array of “angels” that make up the UN system, from NGO activists to UN environmentalist bureaucrats to World Bank “green” advisors.

These claims and their legitimizing discourse are displacing, with different results, the monopoly hold of governments and corporations over the ownership and regulation of the planet’s petroleum. There is much in common in these conceptions of the petroleum commons, but they are also often in conflict. These conflicts will determine how the struggle over the ownership of petroleum and the regulation of its extraction and use will be transformed by the entrance of the “commoners” into a field dominated for over a century by nation states and global corporations.

The Local Petroleum Commons: Nigeria, Chiapas, the Amazon

One of the most important areas where the petroleum commons is emerging as a political reality is the Niger Delta. This area is located in a crossroads of the world market. Three centuries ago the region from Escarvos to Calabar was the main storage and transshipment point of African slaves bound for the plantations of the Americas. This trade poisoned the Delta people’s social relations then. Today the Delta people are caught in the middle of the global oil industry that is poisoning them physically and economically as well as socially. They have been struggling against this fate with great courage and originality, taking a political road that began with a demand for reparations for past damages caused by the oil companies, and has evolved to the declaration of a petroleum commons in the Delta.

This story begins in the early 1990s, when the Ogoni people decided that the time was ripe to transform what had been a long-fought but largely unknown and parochial struggle against both the Nigerian government and the global oil companies into an internationally-recognized one. The Ogonis are a relatively small ethnic group in Nigeria (with a population of less than a million), but they have been in the middle of oil production in Nigeria from its beginning and have suffered greatly for it. Some Ogonis realized that if they had to fight a global oil company–in their case, Royal Dutch Shell–to get reparations, they had to become global themselves. But how was a relatively small, impoverished ethnic group in the midst of an “obscure” part of Africa to “globalize itself”?

Parochial ethnic politics had to be transcended to make clear that the Ogoni struggle was part of the worldwide ecological struggle against the major oil companies. On the heals of the “No Blood for Oil” struggle against the first US-Iraq war, the Ogonis pointed out that they too had suffered to fuel the profits of Shell and the industrial machines of Europe and the US. And with the help of one of their leaders, playwright Kenule Saro-Wiwa, who had built up an international audience with his writings, the message made a connection with environmental groups around the planet.

The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) helped stimulate a “recomposition” of the anti-capitalist movement, since it made it clear that the Ogonis’ demands for reparations for Shell’s destruction of their environment were an integral part of the wider demand that the total costs of capitalist development be recognized and paid for by corporations everywhere. In 1995, Saro-Wiwa was arrested and hanged on false charges of murder by the Nigerian military regime of Gen. Sani Abacha–actions Shell was complicit with. In response, Greenpeace and other environmental groups organized an effective worldwide boycott of Shell, protesting the blood being painfully exchanged for oil in Nigeria as well as the Middle East. Ken Saro-Wiwa paid with his life for connecting the Ogoni with a world environmentalist movement, but his organizational model has been used again and again by other small ethnic groups throughout the world.

The high cost the Ogoni paid for their struggle was noted by other militant groups in the Niger Delta, which have de-emphasized the internationalization of their struggle and focused directly on negotiations with oil companies and the Nigerian government based upon their capacity to hinder or halt production or shipment of oil. These groups, however, have pushed the demands of the struggle to a new level–instead of demanding reparations as MOSOP did, they are claiming ownership of the petroleum underneath their territory as common property.

Thus the most prominent movement in the Delta after the MOSOP effort was the Movement for the Survival of Ijaw Ethnic Nationality (MOSIEN). The Ijaws form one of the largest ethnic groups in the Delta (with a population of approximately eight million), and their struggle has largely rejected non-violence and resurrected the militant symbols and memories of their collective past. The cult of Egbesu, their traditional war god, has been the recruiting ground for young militants who have liberated their leaders from government prisons, taken over oil installations, and kidnapped oil workers.

MOSOP was formally a non-violent organization. Ken Saro-Wiwa and the other Ogoni leaders believed that it was folly to think that a small ethnic group could directly confront the might of the Nigerian army–which was then controlled by a military government. The Ijaw armed resistance has rejected this path, even though it has faced devastating attacks by the Nigerian military–including the horrendous Christmas massacre at Odi in 1999 that left 2,000 dead. This shift in tactics put into question much of the international support that the Ogoni struggle and Saro-Wiwa’s martyrdom had engendered for struggles in the Delta.

There were other important changes in the struggle beside the turn to armed confrontation with the government and oil companies. These included the Kaiama Declaration, that formally claimed the petroleum within Ijaw territory as the common property of the Ijaw community. This notion of the petroleum commons has become the ruling discourse in much of the armed resistance in the Delta. A good example of this is the reply a former president of the Ijaw Youth Council and current militia commander, Alhaji Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, gave to a Financial Times reporter when asked about much his men take from pipelines each day, “As much as we can. It’s free.” Another is the graffiti left behind after the Odi massacre by invading soldiers: “Na you get oil? Foolish people.” (“Does the oil belong to you? Foolish people.”)

Another dramatic political development was the entrance of women’s organizations into the struggle for a petroleum commons. Local women from the Ijaw and Istkeri ethnicities remembered the old tactic of shaming soldiers by appearing before them collectively naked–which was used to effect in the Aba Women’s War of 1929 against the British. After being brutally beaten by oil company guards in November 2002, one group of women protesters in the Delta threatened that “within 10 days from today, if our hospital and rehabilitation bills are not paid, we will all come out en masse fully naked, and we shall occupy not only their gates but their flow stations throughout the Niger Delta…”

What was more threatening to the oil companies and the Nigerian government than the presence of thousands of naked women occupying their oil installations, however, was the fact that women from different, often conflicting ethnic groups had come together at all. For the most powerful weapon the government and the oil companies have in escaping paying reparations and recognizing the Niger Delta communities’ communal ownership of the petroleum under their territory is the division between the groups themselves. However powerful ethnic ties are in strengthening the will to resist, they are also extremely divisive, resulting in thousands of deaths in the last decade. The fact that women from the oft-warring Itsekiri, Ijaw, Ilaje and Urhobos groups could join in a united front indicates that at least they have understood the secret of power. Whether their unity will set the pace for the petroleum commons movement in the Delta is still an open question.

Just as the early 1990s was a crucial turning point for the first step to a petroleum commons on the Niger Delta, that time also saw the organization of indigenous peoples around similar demands in Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia. We know that at that time the Zapatistas were organizing an armed rebellion in Chiapas, launched on New Years Day 1994–the precise moment NAFTA took effect. The Zapatistas’ Subcommendante Marcos frequently pointed out that when the indigenous cut firewood for their homes they are arrested and fined. But when the oil developers cut huge swathes through the forest for their roads and blow down trees with their dynamite, they are congratulated for their productivity!

But as fate would have it, post-rebellion Zapatista communities are often located near or directly over oil deposits. Consequently, the San Andres Accords–the main document arising from the peace talks between the Zapatistas and the Mexican government–included the recognition of the indigenous communities’ “collective right to evaluate federal and state plans to exploit strategic resources in their region in order to determine those plans’ effects on indigenous territories.” This provision which, in effect, gave the indigenous communities a veto over oil exploration and exploitation, was certainly one of the main sticking points that prevented the approval of the Accords.

Similar developments took place in Ecuador in the early 1990s. Although oil exploration and extraction began in the Ecuadorian Amazon in the 1960s, it took some time for the indigenous peoples most affected by the industry’s pollution of their environment and the disintegration of their social life to organize: first to demand a clean-up and compensation, and then to claim the oil as a common resource whose disposition depended upon their will and not the state’s or the oil companies’–up to and including “The Right To Say, ‘No.'”

The Right To Say “No” became extremized in the struggle of the U’wa people in Colombia against Occidental Petroleum’s attempt to explore for oil in their territory, beginning in 1993. The U’wa threatened to commit collective suicide if Occidental Petroleum, which was granted exploration rights in U’wa territory by the Colombian government, actually drilled in their territory. The oil company had estimated over a billion barrels of oil there, and was anxious to verify the estimate. But a combination of law suits in Colombian and international courts, shareholder resolutions, demonstrations in front of its California offices and the home of its CEO carried on by the U’wa and their allies–as well as the threat of mass suicide by the entire U’wa community–somehow almost magically managed to “hide” the oil from the exploratory drills’ reach. Occidental Petroleum then pulled out of U’wa territory without making the second try which is usually standard procedure. Not surprisingly, these failed efforts by Occidental to penetrate the U’wa resistance have been followed by the exploration activities of Ecopetrol, the Colombian state oil company–which will face similar resistance and similar defeats.

The U’wa are one of many local peoples throughout the planet that are going beyond the position of supplicants demanding compensation from the oil industry for the harm oil extraction has caused. The growth of these non-corporate, non-state actors who claim communal ownership of petroleum is remarkable, and is having a decisive impact on the development of the oil industry. This is especially true of the expansion of oil exploration into the “margins”–areas that had previously been too distant from the main centers of the oil industry. It is exactly there that the oil industry is continually confronting people who still have a sense of the commons, since they often have common property resources such as land, and methods to regulate them. Consequently, the state and market paradigms of oil ownership are clashing with dozens of new, often “small,” local movements and communities that, when integrated across the planet, are beginning to have an impact on the legal status of oil ownership.

The Islamic Petroleum Commons: From Morocco to Indonesia

Another notion of a petroleum commons has developed in Islamic economic theory and political practice since the 1970s. It claims that petroleum found beneath Islamic territory is the common possession of the world-wide Islamic community and neither state nor private property. This conception is challenging the relations that have been worked out between global oil companies and Islamic nation-states since World War I.

A key event in the development of the global oil industry was the destruction of the last Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, at the end of World War I. A Caliphate requires a secular military-political entity that is pledged to defend the world-wide Islamic community, and the Ottoman Turks had been performing this role of the “defenders of the faith” since the fifteenth century. Their imperial lands included Iraq, Kuwait, and parts of Saudi Arabia–i.e., the center of the main oil reserves of the planet. In order for the petroleum industry to operate on a completely capitalist basis, the large international oil companies and major imperialist powers at the end of World War I (US, Britain, France) tore up the Ottoman Caliphate and created a number of rentier states that were largely under their control.

This antithesis between a Caliphate and the regular for-profit operation of the oil industry is simple. An Islamic Caliphate had to recognize certain redistributive economic principles (including the notion of a petroleum common owned by the ummah, the entire Islamic community) that are problematic to the kind of total corporate control envisioned by the founders of the oil industry in the Middle East in period between 1918 and 1945. A genuine Caliphate would have had to invest in ways that would have made it autonomous from the directives of the imperialist powers (governmental or corporate). Finally, a genuine Caliphate would have had worldwide reach, and be committed to intervening in areas where the Islamic community resided. These areas were often essential parts of the empires of Britain, France and Holland. (e.g., India, Algeria, and Indonesia).

What is called Islamic fundamentalism, or political Islam, or Islamism, is an effort to revive the Caliphate almost a century after its end. This is what gives these social movements their “global reach,” for they claim to unite and to “protect” the Islamic community–which presently stretches from Morocco to Indonesia and, via immigration, into the heart of Europe and North America.

Whatever the ultimate fate of this type of patriarchal politics and whatever its class composition, this drive to a Caliphate is an important reality for the oil industry since both are operating at the center of the major oil reserves of the planet. Indeed, if one correlates the nation-state members of the Organization of Islamic Congress with the oil reserves that are estimated to lie in their territories, one sees that nearly two-thirds of the world’s petroleum is “Islamic.” Such a drive, of course, is toward an “imagined community”–but then again, what community except the most intimate is not imagined?

Along with the revival of Islam as a political force has come the development of an “Islamic economics” that has a number of tenets relevant to the oil industry. First, since oil is a sub-soil resource, it is seen from an Islamic perspective as a gift from Allah and hence a community good. Although Islamic economics respects private property–after all, Islam is a religion founded by a merchant–it also recognizes the role of communally shared resources. Islamic economics accepts the standard division of private, state and common property, and oil is definitely included in the category of common property. It is now traditional to repeat at this juncture the famous statement of Mohammed: “The people are partners in three things: water, pastures and fire [today, petroleum].” The recognition of an Islamic petroleum commons is seen as a first step in the realization of an Islamic economics.

It is true, of course, some common property must be mined (like oil, gold, silver, and iron), but the minerals themselves remain the common property of all Muslims. The Caliphate might mine them itself or sub-contract their collection, but all revenues gained from their sale should be kept in the Bait al-Mal–the same treasury that the zakat or redistributive tithe, is destined for.

The second principle of Islamic economics is the redistributive one. Islam, for all of its respect of private property, instituted from its beginning a system of income transfers. Even non-Muslims know of the zakat, but there are many other redistributive mechanisms (e.g., the prohibition of charging interest) that make doctrinaire neoliberalism literally anathema in Islamic discourse. For a Caliphate is duty-bound to fund the poor, the needy, the travelers, the debtors and jihad from the funds in the Bait al-Mal. This is especially true of revenues derived from oil production, since they are directly derived from the sale of a communal good. Thus the charges of corruption hurled against the Saudi Arabian elite by Islamists are especially damning, since the Saudi elite’s extravagant ways are literally denying bread to the mouths of poor Muslim babes that Allah destined it for.

The third principle of Islamic economics is one based on the prohibition of waste and the concern for conserving scarce resources. Indeed, if the conspicuous consumption and self-protective expenditure on military hardware of the present elites are stopped, there would be an imperative to leave more oil in the ground. Such an economic policy would have an enormous impact on the pricing of oil, since it would not be considered a state or corporate commodity to be sold to the highest bidder; it would be a common good whose conservation is of value in itself.

Common property in the Islamic tradition is often not emphasized in typical academic expositions of Islamic economics, where the pride of place is taken by a symbolic zakat and a banking system that denies a role to interest. The works of Pakistani social thinker Sayyid Abul-Ala Mawdudi (1903-79), martyred Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb (1906-66) and Iraqi writer Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (1931-80)–the intellectual progenitors of Islamic economics–are often taken to task for trying to impose unrealistic constrains on the development of capitalism in the Islamic world, instead of heeding the free market wisdom of Frederick Hayek! But while critics cite the zakat and prohibition of interest, in fact their doctrine of the petroleum commons that would certainly have a much greater impact on world economics, if it were actually put into place throughout the Islamic world.

This oil doctrine is the theoretical basis of economic planning for an Islamic world of more than a billion people. If a number of Islamic nations actually transformed their petroleum resources into a commons, then three important, perhaps even revolutionary, changes would follow. First, it would lead to a tighter control of the pace of extraction and a willingness to exercise the “Right to say ‘No’,” resulting in a much higher oil price. Second, the surplus of the commons would immediately flow into redistributive projects in the Islamic world and not into the financial systems of Europe and the US. Finally, of course, the whole basis of the neo-liberal program for the Middle East (as outlined in George W. Bush’s plan for the outcome of the Iraq war) would be definitely challenged.

The Global Petroleum Commons and the UN System

If we put together the local petroleum commons claims with those of Islamic economic theorists, then more than 70% of the oil on the planet is notionally claimed to be a part of a commons. Yet, there is still a third notion of petroleum as a global commons that incorporates all oil deposits, whether discovered or not. The proponents of this notion argue that the consequences of the exploration, extraction, distribution and consumption of petroleum are so problematic for “humanity” that they cannot be left to the devices of private companies or nation states. There is, in this view, a global petroleum commons that needs an appropriate regulative community. But what is this community in its present incarnation? The most prominent contemporary answer is: the United Nations system.

Indeed, the concept of a global commons has stimulated the revival of the UN system’s legitimacy in the 1990s–since the system had an identity crisis after the end of the Cold War. For the UN system is increasingly claiming to be the surrogate for a truly global community of humanity that clearly does not yet exist. On the basis of this official representation of the future global community, the UN system has negotiated a number of accords with mining and energy companies that promised these companies ideological legitimacy. These include the Global Compact and the Global Mining Initiative as well as, of course, the Kyoto Accords. This makes the UN system–which includes the World Bank and IMF–the global “partner” to and regulator of the oil, gas and coal companies of the planet.

It is crucial to understand why in the last fifteen years the UN system dares to claim the right to regulate petroleum as a global commons. During this time the extractive industries, with special emphasis on mining and oil, have been in crisis. This was not due to their reaching the absolute limits on supply of minerals or oil. It was due to the refusal of billions of people around the planet to accept the social and environmental impacts of their destructive activities. What appears to be the “natural” limit of extraction (as explained by either the Club of Rome’s “asymptotic depletion curves” or by M. King Hubbert’s “peak oil” graphs) is simply the resistance of an ever-wider circle of people to suffering the consequences of private or state mineral or oil extraction with no compensation or redress. Global warming, environmental pollution and illness, hazardous working conditions have increasingly been the source of anxiety about, protest against and disruption of operations in the extractive industries. Inevitably these responses and the problems they address–not the difficulty of finding new fields of coal, copper or petroleum–have led to these industries’ long-term loss of trust. The extractive industries needed some “legitimate partner” to negotiate with that would not pose the immediate threatening demands that organizations of workers and local communities increasingly present.

Just as the extractive industries were undergoing their crisis, the UN system was facing it own. After all, it was set up to negotiate the conflicts of Capitalism vs. Communism and Colonialism vs. Anti-Colonialism. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and collapse of apartheid in South Africa, what was the UN system to do with itself? Here is where the call of the extractive industries, especially the oil industry, became one of its lifelines. Its identity crisis could be resolved by becoming the “partner” of the extractive industries and regulating them as a representative of the coming global community.

The difficulties of such a surrogate global community has been brought to every one’s attention after more than a decade of the anti-globalization movement’s critique of the UN system’s most powerful elements besides the Security Council–the World Bank and IMF. Instead of the inherent problems of the nation state being transcended by the rise to a global level, the experience of the neo-liberal turn of the World Bank and IMF demonstrates that the UN system often just magnifies the problems of nation-state capitalism. This UN-based “coming global community” once again poses the classic solution to all distributive problems: “What’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is mine.” Thus this “virtual community” (actually composed of the UN-system and its satellite NGOs) feels free to demand, for example, that indigenous people in the South respect “ecological zones” or “conservation regions” it designates even though the actual indigenous community has no real power to control the behavior of this imaginary global community actually substituted for by the UN system. Indeed, the global petroleum commons as defined by the UN system can be seen as merely a preemptive strike against the local and Islamic commons.

The Petroleum Commons as Conflict and Opportunity

The entrance of “commoners” (indigenous peoples, Islamists, or UN officials) into the world of oil ownership and production on the three levels discussed here is undoubtedly creating major changes in the oil industry worldwide. The logic of both market and state rationality is increasingly losing its compelling power to determine the future of oil extraction and, with it, the whole system of capitalist production it energizes.

Critics of capitalism, however, cannot be complacent about the rise of the petroleum commoners. This social reality also poses political problems that can easily divide the anti-capitalist movement as well as make neoliberalism stumble. Every local commons requires a regulatory community with insiders and outsiders, and the outsiders might rightly demand to become insiders, with all the attendant possibility of conflict. Similarly, the regulation of the Islamic petroleum commons can conflict with the rules of local communities and their claimed commons. Finally, the demands of the global commons have already conflicted with the needs of local communities and with the Islamic ummah. But whatever the results of these conflicts, actual or potential, the assumption that petroleum is a different political liquid from water has been put in doubt by the demands and struggles of the petroleum commoners. Will petroleum be as common as water one day? Perhaps.

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This article is based on the text of a talk given at the Fusion Arts Museum in New York City on Nov. 7, 2004

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George Caffentzis is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective. With the Collective he has edited two books, both published by Autonomedia: Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War 1973-1992 and Auroras of the Zapatistas: Local and Global Struggles in the Fourth World War. Midnight Notes is online at: www.midnightnotes.org.

For more on Nigeria and the Shell boycott, see:
http://www.essentialaction.org/shell/issues.html

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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Dec. 10, 2004
Reprinting permissible with attribution

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RWANDA’S SECRET WAR

U.S-Backed Destabilization of Central Africa

Special Report from Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)

by keith harmon snow

KINSHASA — Following days of repeated threats by President Paul Kagame to send Rwandan Defense Forces to attack Hutu rebels based in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), television stations in Kinshasa, DRC’s capital, began broadcasting alerts Nov. 26 that Rwanda’s invasion was underway.

Belgian and US military sources in Kinshasa said that at least five battalions (1,500-3,000 troops) had penetrated the provinces of North and South Kivu from five different points.

“This is a sizeable advance force for the Rwandan army,” said one military source in Kinshasa.

With Rwanda’s government continuing to deny their invasion, some 6,000 Rwandan troops had reportedly penetrated eastern DRC by December 4, making this tiny Rwanda’s third major invasion of its huge neighbor to the west. According to the DRC government, troops of the Armed Forces for the Democratic Republic of Congo (FARDC) have clashed with the RDF at numerous locations. The Monitor newspaper in Uganda Dec. 6 reported that RDF troops passing illegally through Ugandan frontier areas have clashed with Ugandan soldiers. The Monitor reports thousands of Congolese refugees fleeing into Uganda.

Thousands of Congolese civilians, especially women and children, were fleeing North Kivu province as of Dec. 6, according to IRIN, news network of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, with civilians claiming executions and massacres as RDF troops burned and looted everything in their path. NGO staff in the region are bracing for the flood of tens of thousands of internally displaced persons.

The claims were echoed by Rwandan guerilla groups based in DRC. “According to our sources five Rwandan batallions are already in the DRC ready to create chaos,” reported Jean-Marie Higiro, former leader of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). “Kagame’s regime maintains its sponsorship to rebel DRC forces. Under all kinds of tricks, Kagame’s regime is able to continue to pull the strings in the DRC.”

He also rejected claims that the Rwandan military is acting in self-defense from DRC-based guerillas. “Rwanda and its proxy armies in DRC maintain an absolute cordon sanitaire at the Rwandan-Congolese border,” Higiro says. “How can Hutu rebels break through this cordon sanitaire and strike Rwanda, then retreat into the DRC without being intercepted?”

Rwanda’s latest bid to annex DRC’s Kivu provinces was called the “Third War of Occupation of Eastern Congo” by Congolese students who took to the streets of Kisangani in protest on Dec. 4.

Despite Rwanda’s official denials of aggression, Rwandan leaders had actually issued unambiguous warnings in recent days. “You have to make war to have peace,” Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame told United Nations peacekeeping forces on Nov. 23.

“We are preparing to return our forces to the DRC,” Rwanda’s Regional Cooperation Minister Protais Mitali said on the 25th, according to Reuters. “We cannot watch as these extremist forces advance onto our territory.”

Reuters correspondent David Lewis in Kinshasa reported Nov. 26 that the Congolese army has told the United Nations that its soldiers had clashed with Rwandan troops inside Congo. UN peacekeepers found no signs of any fighting, according to Lewis’ U.N. sources. Lewis also reported that clashes had taken place earlier in the week.

United Nations Observer Mission in Congo (MONUC) sources and NGO workers contacted in Goma and Bukavu were unable to confirm the presence of Rwandan troops or the engagement of Rwandan and DRC soldiers.

In Kinshasa, long-time Mobutu opposition party leader Etienne Tshisekedi from the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS) issued a communique Nov. 26 warning that if Rwanda has again invaded DRC then the Congolese people must demonstrate against MONUC.

May and June 2004 saw major demonstrations across DRC where MONUC vehicles and homes rented by MONUC personell were destroyed in protest of MONUCs perceived failure to defend the city of Goma from the invading forces of pro-Rwandan rebel groups in Congo.

It is true that Rwandan and Ugandan guerilla groups continue to maintain a presence in eastern DRC, including the ex-Force Armee Rwandais (ex-FAR, the former Rwandan army), Interahamwe (the militia largely responsible for the 1994 genocide), Allied Democratic Forces for Uganda (ADF). The DRC government and international community have failed to implement the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) process called for by international peace accords.

Rwanda has repeatedly threatened to invade DRC to attack Hutu rebels accused of genocide — Interahamwe and ex-FAR. The “genocidiares” fled Rwanda in 1994 and established themselves in Hutu refugee camps in eastern Zaire (as DRC was then known), with the help of the French intervention force Operation Tourquoise and support from Zaire’s 32-year dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Rwanda also claimed that it must defend the Banyamulenge — Congolese Tutsis — from ongoing genocide.

MONUC entered DRC in 1999 after peace agreements signed in Lusaka, Zambia. Subsequent peace accords in Sun City, South Africa, and negotiations with rebels and militias in eastern DRC, ushered in a peace process under a transitional power-sharing government, implementing a joint UN/DRC program of “DDR,” and the promise of elections in 2005.

The DDR program has largely been an empty promise. The DRC was formally cited at the UN Security Council on Nov. 23 for its lack of cooperation in the arrest of people accused of taking part in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. In a UN press statement, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), Hassan Bubacar Jallow from Gambia, told the Security Council that 14 indicted people were still at large and “the bulk of the fugitives continued to be based in the Democratic Republic of Congo.” The press release stated that the US ambassador to the UN John Danforth called upon the DRC and Kenya to arrest fugitives accused inciting conflicts in the Great Lakes region on the border of DRC and Rwanda.

Impunity for government soldiers and guerillas alike remains endemic in the eastern DRC provinces of Orientale, Equateur and the Kivus. According to a recent alert by Survivor’s Rights International, reports from isolated areas across the country indicate that populations continue to suffer wholesale extortion, racketeering, theft, rape and other violence.

Rights groups accused all sides of exploiting ethnic conflict in the region — including Rwanda’s government. “Relations between the Banyamulenge and other Congolese groups have been strained and are frequently manipulated by politicians in both Rwanda and the DRC,” wrote Human Rights Watch in a June 2004 report, War Crimes in Bukavu. “The past six years of war have contributed to hostility against them as they are increasingly identified as ‘Rwandan’ by other Congolese. Rwanda has often justified its presence in DRC in part as an effort to protect the Banyamulenge people, though this was challenged in 2002 when they attacked the Banyamulenge homelands killing scores of Banyamulenge civilians, shooting some of them from Rwandan helicopters.”

Central Africa’s Ongoing Genocide

Paul Kagame’s Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990, launching a four-year campaign of guerrilla warfare. Open support for Rwanda’s then-Hutu-led government from French paratroopers failed to prevent the RPA victory of August, 1994, following the coordinated genocide of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsis by hard-line Hutus, Force Armee Rwandaise (FAR) and affiliated Interahamwe (Hutu) militias from April to July.

Critics such as Wayne Madsen, author of Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999, assert that Kagame and the RPA orchestrated the April 6, 1994 assassination of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi — shooting down their plane on approach to Kigali airport with SAM-7 surface-to-air missiles taken from Iraq by France in 1991, then delivered by the US military to Uganda, the base for RPA guerrilla operations against Rwanda prior to 1994.

Evidence was provided at a special hearing held by then Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney at DC’s Rayburn House Office Building on April 6, 2001, the seventh Anniversary of the assassinations. Journalist Charles Onana of Cameroon, author of The Secrets of the Rwandan Genocide, also aired claims of RPA involvement in the incident, and was sued for defamation by Paul Kagame. A Paris court found in favor of Onana. Meanwhile, of course, defense attorneys working at the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) maintain that the standard figure of 800,000 Tutsis killed in the 1994 genocide is grossly inflated.

Paul Kagame has been a regular visitor at Harvard University, at the James Baker III Institute in Houston Texas, at the White House and the Pentagon. Kagame visited the Pentagon in August 1996, just prior to the Rwandan/Ugandan/US invasion of Zaire.

US, European and South African military interests have continued to support various factions in Central Africa, arming militias and rebel groups through proxy armies from Uganda (UPDF), Rwanda (RPA), Burundi and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in south Sudan.

Terror continued in Rwanda under the new RPA government of Paul Kagame, with Amnesty International documenting a pattern of assassinations, arbitrary imprisonment and “disappearances.” Nearly all political opponents — Tutsi or Hutu — have been labeled “genocidiares”, and Amnesty has protested that some trials and executions of accused genocidiare collaborators have been tainted and politically-motivated.

The first Rwandan invasion of its huge neighbor to the west occurred in 1996. According to the influential Africa Confidential newsletter, Major Gen. Paul Kagame visited the Pentagon in August of 1996, conferring with Washington prior to setting in motion a grand plan to unseat Mobutu Sese Seko. While the US public was consumed with the 1996 presidential elections, Rwanda was preparing its war against Zaire — and it began with the shelling of Hutu refugee camps in eastern Congo with Katusha missiles, killing noncombatant men, women and children.

RPA joined with Ugandan People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) and the guerilla army of Laurent Kabila’s Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (ADFL) in the “War of Liberation” that subsequently ended the decades long reign of President Mobutu Sese Seko in Congo (Zaire). Sources in DRC quickly add that American military personell were seen on the ground advising the joint UPDF/RPA invasion which swiftly moved across the vast forested territory of Zaire.

Wayne Madsen reported that the US established major communications and listening stations in Uganda’s Ruwenzori Mountains. Witnesses interviewed in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, support this claim. Communications equipment was also seen on Idjwe Island in Lake Kivu, on the DRC-Rwanda frontier.

Interviews with survivors across the country document crimes against humanity and acts of genocide committed against Congolese civilians by all sides in the ensuing war.

“In May 1997, hundreds of unarmed Hutu refugees were massacred in the town of Mbandaka by soldiers of Kabila’s Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (ADFL), operating under apparent Rwandan Army (RPA) command,” wrote Human Rights Watch in June 1998. In an October 1997 report (“What Kabila is Hiding: Civilian Killings and Impunity in Congo”), Human Rights Watch concluded that “Rwandan troops had a role in some of the killings of Rwandan Hutu refugees on Zairean territory.”

Thousands of Hutu refugees may have been slaughtered in Mbandaka in May, 1997, on the day that the Allied Forces for the Democratic Liberation of Congo (AFDL) arrived there. One eyewitness told this reporter: “We ran down to the beach [port] because we heard the shooting. I saw two people shot but there were bodies all lined up on the beach. The soldiers were also throwing dead bodies in the [Congo] river. There were a lot of Tutsi soldiers but we couldn’t distinguish. I saw soldiers question one woman. The woman was not able to talk in [Congolese] Lingala. He said, yes you are among the Rwandais Hutus. He said to the woman, ‘Turn, face the river, prey your God, because you are about to meet your God.’ Then he shot her in the back with an automatic weapon.”

“US special forces were involved,” asserted one DRC army captain interviewed recently. The AFDL forces included UPDF, RPA and US military advisers, he claimed.

Colonel James Kabarebe, now Chief of Staff of the Rwanda Defense Forces, is said to have led a campaign to annihilate fleeing Hutu refugees. Kabarebe has been sited in UN reports for massive violations in Ituri. “Kabarebe was reportedly the biggest advocate of Rwandan support to [ethnic] militias,” wrote UN investigators in MONUC’s Special Report on Events in Ituri, January 2002-December 2003. Rwanda armed, trained, and advised militias in Ituri, as it has in North and South Kivu provinces, the report found.

The RPA joined with the UPDF to invade DRC again in 1998 after ADFL leader Laurent Kabila rejected U.S. and Bechtel Corporation plans for the newly liberated country, annulled mining contracts signed with some powerful western companies before he had even taken power in Kinshasa — including the America Mineral Fields, based in Hope, AK, and said to be linked to then-President Clinton through “Friend of Bill” investors — and ejected the Rwandan and Ugandan military allies that brought him to power.

The Congolese government called it the “War of Aggression,” but it was dubbed “Africa’s First World War” by the western press, as it involved six regional nations as well as arms and advisers from western countries. Troops from Rwanda and Uganda (now backing anti-Kabila rebels) as well as Zimbabwe (allied with the DRC government) worked with commercial agents pilfering DRC’s ivory, diamonds, gold, timber, cobalt and other natural resources. Foreign agents moved these plundered resources onto the international market, as militia groups raked in local profits.

At least 3.5 million people died due to warfare in DRC, according to the International Rescue Committee (IRC) report on the region for the period from 1998 to 2001. From 1999-2001, through networks of Rwandan military and commercial agents, Rwandan interests aligned with the state earned some $120 million in the sale of coltan (columbo-tantalite) — a precious ore essential to Sony play-stations, laptop computers and cell-phones. In December 2000 alone, the main RPA-supported rebel group in DRC earned some $600,000 in coltan sales. Coltan moved through criminal syndicates to American, Swiss, Belgian and German clients. Rwandan syndicates continue to dominate the coltan trade out of eastern DRC, local sources claim.

Friends of the Earth and the UK-based group Rights and Accountability in Development (RAID) filed a formal complaint with the US State Department on August 4, 2004 against three US companies accused by the UN Panel of Experts of fueling war in DRC. The UN panel’s three-year investigation implicated Cabot Corporation (Boston), Eagle Wings Resources International and George Forrest’s OM Group (Ohio) in collaboration with various rebel groups trafficking in coltan from DRC. Current deputy director of the US Treasury Department, Samuel Bodman, was CEO and chairman of Cabot from 1997-2001.

An Unraveling Peace Process

The DRC frontier with Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi has remained the locus of instability and guerrilla warfare since before the first Rwandan invasion of Congo in 1996 and the rising insecurity and terrorism has not gone unnoticed by the local civilian populations. North and South Kivu provinces continue to suffer from widespread violence, and killings in the Goma and Bukavu areas are rampant. The Ituri region of Orinetale Province, bordering on Uganda, Sudan and Central African Republic, is cited as one of the bloodiest corners of the world by numerous human rights agencies. The UN Security Council’s Special Report on Ituri, January 2002-December 2003, outlines the history of conflict in Ituri, the role of Ugandan and Rwandan government forces in arming factions, bombing villages, massacring and torturing civilians, and provoking and, at times, abetting, acts of genocide.

Given the rising insecurity in Ituri in recent months, with assassinations and nightly shootings, the population in Bunia increasingly sees MONUC as a hostile and aggressive force of foreign military occupation.

Said one Bunia resident formerly employed by MONUC: “Public opinion is that MONUC has done nothing. People thought that MONUC came here to bring peace but to their surprise people find that MONUC is like a spectator in a football match. But people are dying in their presence. People are being terrorized in their presence. People are being killed in there presence. And MONUC is doing nothing.”

“Firing incidents occur daily,” admitted one public information officer for MONUC. “I don’t think there is any area except maybe in Bunia [town] where the human rights situation is improving.”

Reports of MONUC personnel buying and transporting contraband goods — leopard and okapi skins, gold, ivory — are also widespread.

Arms continue to flow into the region. Uganda’s government newspaper the New Vision Nov. 23 reported that arms shipments reportedly destined for the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), a regional militia aligned with Rwanda, were seized by the Armed Forces of the Congolese People (FAPC), a rival Congolese militia in control of the lucrative Ituri Province customs posts in northeastern DRC. The story was picked up by a Chinese news service only.

“According to local sources, local government officials have delivered firearms to civilians in Masisi, North Kivu, long the site of conflict between different political and military groups,” wrote Human Rights Watch on November 19. “Other shipments have been delivered to Ituri, another persistently troubled area in northeastern Congo. U.N. sources reported that some 300 Congolese high school students, refugees in neighboring Rwanda, abruptly left their schools and are said to be undergoing military training.”

According to recent reports from northern Ituri, the FAPC has reportedly executed child soldiers seeking to enter the DDR process, and attacked the families and looted the homes of reintegrated ex-child soldiers.

“All armed groups in Ituri have integrated children into their ranks,” wrote MONUC investigators in Special Report on Events in Ituri, January 2002-December 2003. MONUC conservatively estimated “at least 40 percent of each militia force are children below the age of 18, with a significant minority below the age of 15.”

The MONUC investigation found that Ugandan and Rwandan military were frequently training children abducted and forcibly or willingly recruited into DRC militias. MONUC documented cases where hundreds of children were taken by road or plane to Uganda or Rwanda for military training. Child soldiers were sometimes “trained” by child soldiers. Some children have been passed from one group to another.

The UPC and the Front for National Integration (FNI) another militia, continue to extort a weekly war tax from citizens, persecute those who refuse to comply, and terrorize the citizenry. Said one witness, “The UPC is collecting money. They say, ‘either you pay 100 francs Congolese or we come at night.’ Then when they come they cut off your hand or violate women.”

“Sexual violence is a national epidemic in DR Congo,” wrote Survivors Rights International (SRI) in November, “involving all military factions, both current and past military forces involved in the internal affairs of the DRC, and it appears to be sanctioned by all levels of military command. SRI research completed in Equateur and Orientale (Ituri) from September to November 2004 indicates that the scale and frequency of sexual violence committed during the successive wars (1996-2004) is unprecedented and unquantifiable.”

SRI also reported that the presence of hundreds of internally displaced girls and women currently resident in Mbandaka has spawned commerce in prostitution and survival sex involving both Armed Forces of Democratic Republic of Congo (FARDC) and MONUC troops. “FARDC further prey on female sex workers by forcing sexual relations, raping those who refuse, and universally robbing desperate females of their livelihood,” SRI wrote. “FARDC soldiers in rural areas and population centers continue to steal and abduct the wives of civilians, and to abduct women and adolescent girls many of whom are impregnated and abandoned.”

SRI called on the UN, MONUC and the international community to define and implement a new strategy for dealing with widespread and ongoing sexual violence, noting “that the societal effects will be long-lasting, and that accountability for sexual violence could be easily countered given greater international attention to gender violence in the DRC and a campaign to end impunity and bring the perpetrators to justice. The MONUC communications infrastructure installed nationwide in DRC (Radio Okapi) provides an excellent and functioning tool for raising the awareness of sexual violence and the growing campaign to hold perpetrators to account through the International Criminal Court.”

On November 28, 2004, a group of seven young women arrived in Mbandaka — after trekking hundreds of miles from Orientaleís westernmost city of Lisala — reporting that they were raped in the past week by government soldiers (FARDC). Other girls are also being raped, the seven survivors said.

Secret Resource Wars

Rwanda and Uganda continue to benefit from high-level military arrangements with the United States. Entebbe, Uganda, is a forward base for US Air Force operations in Central Africa. According to the Global Policy watchdog, there are eleven US servicemen permanently stationed in Entebbe.

The Canadian mining firms Barrick Gold and Heritage Oil & Gas arrived with Ugandan (UPDF) and Rwandan (RPA) military during the “War of Aggression” to exploit mining opportunities in the north. Barrick prinicpals include former Canadian premier Brian Mulroney and former US president George H.W. Bush. Heritage has secured contracts for the vast oil reserves of Semliki basin, beneath Lake Albert, on both the Congolese and Ugandan sides of the border. Heritage is reportedly tapping the Semliki petroleum reserves from the Ugandan side, where a huge pipeline to Mombasa, Kenya, worth billions of dollars, is now in the works.

According to a petroleum futures report (Africafront), Heritage Oil was poised to exploit the northern Lake Albert basin, southern Lake Albert basin, River Semliki basin, and Lake George and Lake Albert basin areas in partnership with the Zhongyuan Petroleum Exploration Bureau (ZPEB) of China.

Ashanti Goldfields has reportedly secured a contract for the vast gold reserves at Mongwalu, north of Bunia. Ashanti has ties to the British Crown and some sources in Bunia report that the Ashanti interest in nearby Mongwalu is guarded by Nepalese Gurkhas, possibly of the Gurkha Security Group based in Britain.

Elsewhere in DRC, major foreign mining and logging contracts are underway.

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See also WW3 REPORT #100

keith harmon snow is a journalist and photographer specializing in Central Africa. He attended the Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) in Tanzania in 2000, and provided expert testimony at a special congressional hearing in Washington DC. His work on genocide and covert operations in Africa won two Project Censored awards in 2002. His website is http://www.allthingspass.com/

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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Dec. 10, 2004
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingRWANDA’S SECRET WAR 

INDIGENOUS ECUADOR MEETS THE NEW BOSS

Indian Leaders Helped Get President Lucio Gutierrez Elected—But Now Say the IMF and Big Oil Are Calling the Shots

by Bill Weinberg

On Aug. 21, Ecuador’s President Lucio Gutierrez was pictured in the Quito daily Hoy, smiling and clad in a hard-hat as he turned the valves at an Andean pumping station, officially opening the new pipeline which is to bring 450,000 barrels of crude daily over the towering moutains from the Amazon Basin oilfields of Occidental Petroleum and other industry majors. The Heavy Crude Oilduct (OCP) was built by a consortium led by Canada’s Encana, Spain’s Repsol and California’s Occidental–or Oxy. Gutierrez hailed the mega-project as “a new artery for Ecuador’s development.”

But the very indigenous leaders who helped bring Gutierrez to power on a populist platform in last year’s elections say the OCP violates Ecuador’s constitution, and is bringing war to the remote Shuar and Quichua Indian communities of the Amazon.

The break between Gutierrez and the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), the country’s powerful new coalition representing all indigenous groups, came in August, and has been dramatic. The split was sparked when Gutierrez–a former army colonel who had helped lead a coup in support of Ecuador’s January 2000 indigenous uprising–signed a Letter of Intent with the International Monetary Fund, agreeing in principle to a series of “structural adjustments” the IMF had demanded in exchange for a $205 million loan. The letter included a commitment to precisely the same policies which had sparked the 2000 uprising–including a pledge to boost oil production and re-channel the revenues from social spending to foreign debt payments.

Aug. 21 saw protests in Quito and across the country by Indians, campesinos, workers, students and retirees. One group of leaders from the Andean regional indigenous alliance ECUARUNARI and the activist group Accion Ecologica issued a demand that Bob Traa, head of the IMF mission in Ecuador, be expelled from the country “for improper use of his visitor’s status and for inciting national authorities to adopt measures prejudicial to the public interest and national security.”

The indigenous-led Pachakutic Plurinational Unity Movement–created by CONAIE, but conceived as an indpendent political organization–had four ministers in the Gutierrez government, for the exterior, agriculture, education and tourism. Two were mestizos, but–unprecedentedly–two were Indians. All have now stepped down. In a rapid reversal, Gutierrez is now seeking a new alliance with the conservative Social Christian party–which Pachakutic representative Antonio Posso described as a “barbarity” in an interview with the Quito daily La Hora Sept. 21.

The rift was evident immediately after Pachakutic and CONAIE threw their support behind Gutierrez for the December run-off election which brought him to power. On a lightning trip to New York and Washington right after his deal with indigenous leaders in Quito, Gutierrez portrayed himself as far more conciliatory to US interests than he had in his campaign. He backed off from his promises to reconsider the dollarization of Ecuador’s economy that his predecessor Gustavo Noboa had imposed, and to expel US troops from the Pacific coast military base Manta. He praised balanced budgets and foreign investment, and pledged a prompt new agreement with the IMF. He also expressed support for boosting petrol production and granting new foreign concessions in the oil-rich Amazon.

Since the break with CONAIE and Pachakutic, Gutierrez has accelerated this trajectory. On Sept. 26, the Guayaquil daily El Universo ran twin front-page headlines–one on an announcement by the state oil firm Petroecuador that $13 million in new investment would be needed to fill the OCP; another on Gutierrez’ recent appearance before the Council of the Americas in New York City (an arm of David Rockefeller’s Americas Society), in which he pledged to guarantee a favorable climate for foreign investment. Gutierrez promised the assembled corporate dignitaries his new labor code would break up the “union mafias” and that oil workers who have led work stoppages in the past “are going to be fired.”

CONAIE AND PACHAKUTIC: BACK IN OPPOSITION

The indigenous movement–which has twice led national uprisings that were instrumental in bringing down the government–are now back in opposition after their first taste of official power. At presstime, Pachakutic–named for the legendary Inca who first extended Quechua rule to what is now Ecuador–is meeting in the highland town of Riobamba to vote in new leadership for the organization and hash out a new stance. While there is contention over the future of the organization–as a political party or a grassroots movement–here is broad consensus on complete opposition to the Gutierrez government.

As Pachakutic convened in Riobamba, I spoke with CONAIE president Leonidas Iza at the group’s offices in a post-industrial district of Quito. I showed Iza the clip of Gutierrez opening the new pipeline and asked for his reaction.

As Iza read the entire text of the article, a sad smile came to his face. “OCP was built to facilitate expanded exploitation in the Amazon,” he said finally. “The government is not respecting the constitution. They are obliged to consult with the indigenous peoples of the region. Gutierrez pledged to respect usos y costumbres. It was a pure lie. During 30 years of oil exploitation indigenous peoples have not seen one benefit–it all goes to the foreign debt.”

“Usos y costumbres” means the traditional system of indigenous self-government that has persisted in Ecuador for over 500 years. But Gutierrez, despite his pledge, never explicitly took a stance against the OCP. The real betrayal, Iza says, was the deal with the IMF.

“When Gutierrez signed his accord with the IMF, we were not consulted. Forty-two percent of the national budget goes to the foreign debt–this with illiteracy and poor health care throughout the countryside, and no real agrarian policy from this government.”

Iza says CONAIE and Pachakutic support an agrarian policy of making credit available for campesino micro-enterprises–and a resumption of Ecuador’s long-suspended land redistribution program. “A great percentage of Ecuador’s territory remains in the hands of the hacendados, especially the best lands,” he says. “Many of these lands should be bought by the government, with just compensation to the current owners, and turned over campesino collectives and enterprises.”

Iza emphasizes that the Pachakutic political program being hashed out in Riobamba is not just for the Indians. “We don’t want to indigenize the political process,” he says. “We want an open struggle for transparency and against corruption–against the neoliberal policy of this government, against privatization, the cutting of services. The citizens voted for the proposals of Pachakutic, and they were betrayed.”

Iza also protests what he calls Gutierrez‚ “involvement in Plan Colombia.” On Aug. 21, the eve of a visit to Quito by Colombian president Alvaro Uribe Velez to enlist Gutierrez‚ support for his “anti-terrorist” crusade, CONAIE issued a communique declaring Uribe persona non grata in Ecuador. Some 3,000 police were mobilized to protect the Colombian president–over twice the number assigned for the previous day’s protests on economic policy.

“It has nothing to do with us,” Iza says of Uribe’s counter-insurgency program. “It isn’t our war. We want a peaceful Ecuador.” He says that Gutierrez‚ militarization of the Colombian border zone, especially in the Amazon, is forcing native peoples from their territories–as are the anti-drug fumigations that drift into Ecuador from across the frontier. “The indigenous are abandoning their lands and heading for the cities in these zones,” Iza says.

43 years old, Iza is a Quechua from Cotopaxi, the central Andean province dominated by the towering snow-peaked volcano of the same name. He still has land there, which is worked by his wife when he is in Quito, and by his seven kids on the weekends, when they are not in school. (An eighth is studying medicine in Havana.) The farm produces potatoes, onions, carrots and milk.

A reporter and cameraman from Ecuador’s Gama Vision TV, who shared the first part of the interview with me in Iza’s office, asked him the inevitable question: will there be a new national uprising of the kind that brought down President Jamil Mahuad in January 2000 and dealt a fatal blow to his now-disgraced successor Gustavo Noboa a year later? “It all depends,” came Iza’s reply. “It depends on the government. If they continue with their policies, the people will inevitably rise up. If they change to a policy of betterment of all the Ecuadorian people, there will be no reason. We will maintain our vigilance.”

WHO’S DOWN WITH OCP? (YEAH, YOU KNOW OXY!)

Preliminary tests have now been completed on the OCP, which passes through 11 nature reserves–including the expansive Cayambe-Coca cloud forest reserve that straddles the divide between the Amazon Basin and the Pacific. The pipeline is now ready to begin exports at the Pacific port of Esmeraldas. Points along the way where construction met physical resistance include the Mindo-Nambillo protected forest, a pocket of tropical selva in a valley east of Quito where locals who have staked their economic future to eco-tourism repeatedly blocked consortium workers who came to cut trees for the pipeline right-of-way. Construction also met resistance from Shuar and Quichua communities at Shushufindi in the Amazon province of Sucumbios.

The OCP starts at Lago Agrio, the capital and central town of Sucumbios. From there, feeder pipelines reach down to the oil exploitation blocks of Oxy, Encana, Italy’s Agip and the trans-European firm Perenco, another minor OCP consortium member which recently bought exploration rights to several blocks from the US energy giant Kerr-McGee. These exploitation blocks also frequently overlap with both indigenous territories and official protected areas. Oxy operates wells within the Limoncocha biological reserve of the Ecuadorian Amazon, a region collectively known as Oriente.

Lago Agrio’s mayor opposed the pipeline, which nearly cuts through the urban center. So did the prefect of Sucumbios, the province’s elected leader. But under Ecuador‚s centralist political system, real power lies with the provincial governors, who are appointed by the president.

Alexandra Almeida of the group Accion Ecologica, which coordinated the campaign against the OCP, says the project has grave implications for both the environment and human rights. “There were four spills while the OCP was still under construction, and more than 70 illegal detentions,” she says.

The most recent spill, in May, was caused by a landslide, and sent an undetermined amount of oil into the Rio Reventador, an Ecuadorian Amazon tributary. In March, a rupture at a pumping station near Lago Agrio sent 60 barrels into the surrounding rainforest. The May rupture affected both the OCP and a pre-existing pipeline that it parallels for much of its route, the Trans-Ecuadorian Oilduct System (SOTE). The SOTE was built in the 1970s for Texaco, and is now run by the Ecuadorian state.

Almeida charges that the OCP was built under the false pretext that separate pipelines were needed for light and heavy crude. “The Mineral Industry of Ecuador” by Pablo Velasco, in the US Geological Survey Minerals Yearbook 2001, states the basic case: “In 2001, heavy and lightcrude from the Oriente were mixed and transported together through SOTE, thereby degrading the value of the lighter crude. However, when the OCP is completed, it will transport theheavy crude, and SOTE will transport the light.”

But now, Almeida says, a tunnel near Lago Agrio mixes light oil from the SOTE with heavy oil from the OCP to dilute it and make it possible to pump over the mountains cheaply. This light oil is sold below cost and constitutes a state subsidy of the OCP, according to Almeida. “The entire argument for the project was trickery,” Almeida charges.

SARAYACU: CORPORATE MILITARIZATION OF QUICHUA LAND

Nowhere have the human rights impacts of the OCP been felt as harshly as at Sarayacu, the extremely remote territory of a Quichua people in Pastaza province. This is the most inaccessible part of Oriente, hundreds of miles south of where the pipelines currently reach. But, in anticipation of a new phase of development spurred by the OCP, the government has already divided the region into blocks leased out to foreign oil companies. This has sparked a crisis at Sarayacu which Almeida says is in danger of escalating into a small regional war–in an isolated territory invisible to the outside world.

The oil blocks at Sarayacu were leased to a consortium consisting of ChevronTexaco (as the conglomerate is called since a recent merger) and the Argentine firm CGC. Last Nov. 22, a seismic crew contracted by the consortium entered Sarayacu territory without authorization from local indigenous authorities–and were forcibly detained by the Sarayacu. The workers were released following negotiations by both the consortium and provincial police authorities. But the tensions in the region only escalated after the incident–as the consortium brought in an armed security force, backed up Ecuadorian army troops.

On Jan. 13, CGC/ChevronTexaco armed guards reportedly opened fire on Sarayacu who were travelling by the Rio Bobonaza on a mission to demarcate the traditional limits of their territory. According to a report on Sarayacu.com, a website maintained by the community and their supporters in Puyo, the provincial capital: “The people had to lay down in the bottom of the canoe while gunfire passed above their heads. Meanwhile, other petrol workers, apparently intoxicated, approached in canoes, armed with machetes.” A Sarayacu man in a second canoe returned fire with his shotgun, wounding a man who later proved to be a CGC cook. Arrest warrants have now been issued for four Sarayacu men in the incident–but none of the CGC-contracted gunmen.

In April, with exploration in the region stalled by the tension, ChevronTexaco announced that it was withdrawing from the consortium and selling its share in Block 23˜which includes nearly all the Sarayacu communities˜to the firms Burlington and Perenco. The Sarayacu counted this as a victory˜but CGC continues to hold a 50% stake in the block, and vowed to pursue exploration.

On May 5, following a petition by the Sarayacu and their supporters, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) ordered the Ecuadorian government to take cautionary measures to protect the Sarayacu, and open an investigation into the violence. But on May 29, Pastaza‚s Governor Fernando Ordoñez was quoted in the Guayaquil daily El Universo that “the decision of the regime is to initiate the petrol activity in the blocks number 23 and 24even it has to use the public force.”

In September, CGC announced that it intends to resume seismic tests within Sarayacu territory by year‚s end, and President Gutierrez told a radio interview: “We will guarantee complete security for the petrol companies. We have already talked with Sarayacu and we are about to reach an agreement, only four leaders are in opposition of this, but the rest of them agree.” Sarayacu responded by issuing a statement that the community “excludes for perpetuity the possibility that the state promotes projects of extraction of non-renewable resources within their territories.” Marlon Santi, president of the Sarayacu community, stated that “the Ecuadorian Government has not maintained any conversation with us since February 2003, neither has it implemented the cautionary measures ordered by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Instead, it has initiated a campaign of intimidation and pressure”.

Pastaza‚s own ombudsman‚s office˜in contrast to the presidentially-appointed provincial governor˜ruled in April that CGC and the former minister of energy and mines who granted the concession, Pablo Teran, violated articles 84 and 88 of Ecuador‚s constitution that mandate indigenous communities be consulted about development projects on their territories. But these provisions took effect in the constitutional reform of 1998, while the Block 23 concession was granted in 1996˜and the government maintains the constitutional guarantee should not be considered retroactive.

Accion Ecologica‚s Almeida warns that the militarization of Oriente is spreading south from the Colombian border˜and that the real targets are not guerrillas or narco-trafficantes but indigenous peoples who stand in the way of oil industry designs. “They are killing the people of the Amazon for this petroleum,” she says. “And it is all the fault of the OCP.”

In his final words in my interview, CONAIE‚s Leonidas Iza also invoked the threat of Colombia‚s war spreading south into the Ecuadorian Amazon˜and the global implications of the rainforest‚s disappearance. “We want to live in peace, we don’t want to bloody our hands with terrorism,” Iza says. “Our work is to protect the Mother Earth. What is happening here in Ecuador is a danger for the whole world.”

(Sept. 27, 2003) .

MORE ECUADOR NEWS

RIOTS ROCK QUITO
On Sept. 26, as Ecuador’s Congress approved a measure revising the country’s labor code, hundreds of public-sector employees held an angry protest outside the Congress building, breaking through police barricades that surrounded the building. Thousands of riot police responded with clubs and tear gas, and some protesters repotedly retaliated with Molotov cocktails. One police officer and several protesters were injured. The new law freezes wages for many public-sector workers, bans strikes and includes supposed anti-nepotism measures which union leaders say are actually designed to weaken organized labor. The indigenous-led political movement Pachakutic expelled legislator Jose Columbo from the organaztion for voting in favor of the measure. (Expreso de Guayaquil; Hoy, Guayaquil; El Universo, Guayaquil, Sept. 26)

“WHITE LEGION” RE-EMERGES
The Quito daily El Comercio received items for their condolences column announcing the death of four living journalists and academics who are critical of the government. Fortunately, the scam was caught before the condolences were printed. The Ecumenical Commission on Human Rights (CEDHU) claimed that the sinister joke was the work of the Legion Blanca, a clandestine ultra-right organization that has repeatedly threatened journalists, social leaders, intellectuals and human rights observers in recent years. (Ultimas Noticias, Quito, Sept. 24)

NOTE: One of the threatened journalists is Kintto Lucas, who reported for Inter Press Service May 29, 2002 on the IMF making new loans conditional on channeling OCP oil export profits from public healthcare to servicing the foreign debt. The IMF demands repeal of an Ecuadorian law under which ten percent of state oil revenues must go to public healthcare.

25 “DISAPPEARANCES” IN PAST 19 YEARS
Ecuador’s Ecumenical Commission on Human Rights (CEDHU) released a report detailing violations since 1994 (five years after the military dictatorship ended), including 25 “disappearances,” 115 extrajudicial executions, 1,183 cases of torture and over 6,800 arbitrary arrests. CEDHU and the Committee of the Families of the Disappeared called on Ecuador’s Congress to reopen investigations into some cases, including the disappearance of the writer Gustavo Garzon and the death of Arturo Jarrin, leader of the now-disbanded guerilla group Alfaro Vive Carajo (AVC). (El Comercio, Quito, Sept. 21)

HIGH COURT: AMAZON SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM VIOLATES INDIGENOUS RIGHTS
Ecuador’s Constitutional Tribunal, the nation’s highest court, struck down a contract between the Environment Ministry and the French firm Societe Generale de Surveillance (SGS) for construction of a satellite system to monitor the Amazon region. The contract, signed last year under then-President Gustavo Noboa, was to build a system mirroring the Amazon Surveillance System (SIVAM) which the US firm Raytheon recently completed for Brazil, to monitor drug trafficking and other activities in the rainforest. But the Constitutional Tribunal found that the government acted unconstitutionally in approving the contract without consulting the indigenous peoples of the Amazon region, invoking “the right of said peoples to participate in the use, usufruct, administration and conservation of resources that are found in their territories.” (La Hora, Quito, Sept. 21)

ARMY CRACKS DOWN ON FARC ARMS PIPELINE
Following charges against several Ecuadorian armed forces officials of allegedly pilfering arms to sell to Colombia’s FARC guerillas, a Junta of Transparency has been declared to oversee the public investigation into the case. The five-member Junta is made up of prominent civilian officials and ex-officials. Meanwhile, the US Embassy denied that it had intercepted a supposed November 2002 radio-transmitted conversation between Ecuadorian army captain Carlos Taipe and a Colombian guerilla commander. A tape of the conversation is the main piece of evidence in the case against Taipe, but the source of the tape is still uncertain, and Taipe denies that it is his voice on the tape. (El Universo, Guayaquil, Sept. 24)

See also WW3 REPORT 92: http://ww3report.com/article.pl?sid=03/09/23/02582 32&tid=6

COLOMBIA WAR DESTABILIZES NORTHERN FRONTIER
Ecuadorian army commander Gen. Luis Aguas has ordered 7,000 troops to the border with Colombia, citing the presence of 5,000 Colombian irregulars–guerillas and paramilitaries–in the zone. “Definitely, we have a subversive threat in the country, with the presence of the FARC and ELN,” said Gen. Aguas. Noting that with the exception of the main Panamerican Highway border crossing at Ipiales the Colombian government maintains no military bases along the Ecuadorian border, the Bogota daily El Tiempo recently theorized that Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe has a secret strategy to draw Ecuador into the war. Reporting on El Tiempo’s speculation, the Quito daily El Comercio noted that three months after Uribe’s June announcement that he intended to crush the guerilla insurgency within 18 months, the border with Ecuador still remains permeable to illegal armed groups. The Ecuadorian armed forces maintain that 97% of the frontier is under guerilla control on the Colombian side. Gen. Aguas admitted the possibility that “the Colombian government has an interest in regionalizing the conflict.” (El Comercio, Quito, Sept. 21)

MASSACRE ON COLOMBIAN BORDER
The bodies of three local campesinos in the village of Mataje, along the Colombian border in the Pacific coastal province of Esmeraldas, were fuond by an Ecuadorian army patrol Sept. 26–two days after an apparent incursion by Colombian gunmen. A fourth–a seven-year-old girl who had been left tied to a tree with a gaping wound in her throat–died upon arrival at the local hospital. Residents say that at least 20 more villagers are missing since the attack. Authorities are investigating survivors’ claims that the attack was retaliation for refusing orders from a Colombian armed gang to plant coca and opium on Ecuadorian territory. Army sources also claimed that at least 45 families have been assassinated by FARC guerillas on the Colombian side of the border in recent days in that zone, as the guerillas search for a stolen cache of arms and munitions. The Esmeraldas border region is the scene of escalating gunplay. On Sept. 4, in the nearby village of San Lorenzo, a street gunbattle left two Colombian nationals dead–each with over 20 bullets. (El Universo, Guayaquil, Sept. 27)

Continue ReadingINDIGENOUS ECUADOR MEETS THE NEW BOSS 

YES, ORWELL MATTERS—BUT DOES CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS?

by Bill Weinberg

WHY ORWELL MATTERS
by Christopher Hitchens
Basic Books, New York, 2002, 211 pp., $24

(Published in the UK as ORWELL’S VICTORY, Penguin, London, 2002)

Here is a little exercise in historical ironies.

Few seem to remember it now, but in the 1980s, forgotten little Nicaragua was one of the last front-lines of the Cold War. When I was there in those years, one of many idealistic gringos who came to witness the besieged revolution, the right-wing opposition was distributing a Spanish translation of a classic parable of revolution betrayed. This was a probable element of the CIA “psychological operations” campaign aimed at subverting the revolutionary Sandinista regime, which also included distribution of the notorious “dirty tricks” manual advocating sabotage and assassination. The regime responded by denouncing the parable as a counter-revolutionary polemic written by a reactionary pro-imperialist writer. The work, of course, was Animal Farm by George Orwell.

This same author was in Spain in the 1930s, supporting a besieged revolution of his own day–fighting in an independent communist militia (“Trotskyist,” to use the common misnomer) then allied with anarchist militias in resisting Gen. Francisco Franco’s fascists in Catalonia. These anarchists and independent communists were collectivizing land and industry in Catalonia–much as the Sandinistas would in Nicaragua 50 years later. Together, these forces would also resist the center-left Popular Front government in Madrid, which paradoxically moved to crush Catalonia’s revolution in 1937 at the behest of Josef Stalin—who feared that the Catalan movement was too uncontrollable. In his war memoir Homage to Catalonia, the habitually critical Orwell relates how, arriving in Spain purely to fight fascism, he wound up bearing arms in defense of the Catalan revolution. “I have no particular love for the idealized ‘worker’ as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind,” he wrote, “but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”

Orwell even expressed enthusiasm for the anarchists’ vicious habit of torching churches! In one passage he describes a brief touristic excursion to Barcelona’s modernist cathedral—clearly Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, although he doesn’t mention it by name—and finding it appallingly ugly. “I think the Anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up,” he mused. He did, however, take some comfort from the fact that the anarchists had hung their red-and-black flag between its spires.

The irony is exquisitely nuanced. Nicaragua’s Sandinistas revived the anti-fascist slogan of the Spanish war, No pasaran! (They shall not pass!)–coined in the 1930s to refer to the Nazi-backed Franco forces, and then in the 1980s to refer to the US-backed “contra” guerillas. And the Sandinistas’ own flag was a direct descendant of that which Orwell hailed on the spires of the Sagrada Familia. The flag of the Spanish anarchists was a field equally divided into red (for revolution) and black (for the negation of authority). The 1930s Nicaraguan revolutionary Augusto Cesar Sandino, who resisted the occupying US Marines, was inspired by the anarchists, and adopted this flag—putting a skull and cross-bones on it in place of the acronym of Spain’s National Labor Confederation, CNT. When the Sandinista National Liberation Front launched their struggle against the US-imposed Somoza dictatorship a generation later, they revived this flag, replacing the logo this time with their own acronym, FSLN. With a few minor differences, it was the same flag flown by the anarchists in the ’30s. At the same time that they flew it, their regime tilted towards Moscow in the Cold War, ran Moscow-line denunciations of Poland’s Solidarity union in the government daily Barricada –and denounced Orwell as a counter-revolutionary.

Meanwhile, the architects of the Nicaraguan counter-revolution, Reagan’s “privatized” spy network that undermined the US Constitution and international order by organizing a lawless mercenary army out of basement of the White House—the “contras,” led by thugs from the ousted Somoza dictatorship—had the chutzpah to call themselves “Project Democracy.” This abuse of the English language was of precisely the kind that Orwell relentlessly satirized. Yet these architects, for their own cynical interests, apparently promoted Orwell in revolutionary Nicaragua.

And now, in 2003, one of those architects, former National Security Council chief John Poindexter—who was convicted (later overturned on immunity grounds) of lying to Congress about his role in the Nicaraguan affair—has been appointed head of a Pentagon agency, the Office of Information Awareness, which is building the capacity to peer into the intimate details of the private lives of the citizenry. Your credit card, telephone and personal computer have conspired to become the all-seeing “telescreens” of Orwell’s 1984. A final irony–now that the Cold War is over, the telescreens have finally arrived. So has the Ministry of Truth, in the form of a special Pentagon office for “black” propaganda (lies, in the vernacular), the quite Orwellianly-named Office of Strategic Information, revealed in the New York Times last year.

Orwell was a man of the left whose biggest boosters since his death in 1950 have been on the right, and whose biggest critics have been on the left. Both the boosters and critics have a lot invested in the notion that 1984 was only a satire of the East—despite the fact that Orwell explicitly denied this, more than once. This lie—this appropriation of a socialist, anti-colonialist writer in the interests of empire—can be termed the Orwellian manipulation of Orwell. The writer’s own personal obsession with the very concept of truth makes the manipulation even more perverse. Now that the telescreens are finally here—under capitalism, not Communism—it is more important (and one would think easier) than ever for the left to reclaim Orwell.

Yet the man who would rise to this task has problems of his own. The most disappointing thing about Christopher Hitchens’ Why Orwell Matters is its lack of passion–especially in light of the current terrifying historical juncture. Hitchens argues that Orwell matters because he was prematurely correct about Fascism, Stalinism and Empire. But there is a distinct absence of outrage against the machine here—which is not surprising, given Hitchens’ own recent rightward trajectory. Hitchens may argue that Orwell was right about Empire—but he now supports imperial military adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. He recently left The Nation, where he was a columnist of many years, in disagreement over such issues. The title of his book’s British edition, Orwell’s Victory, is especially telling–implying that the world, or at least those who run it, has actually heeded the dystopian prophet’s warnings.

Does it help Orwell to have Hitchens leading the charge in his defense? Even in Orwell’s lifetime, the agents of empire were seeking to exploit his work, and he was cognizant of this. Hitchens actually does a good job of illustrating this reality. In his chapter “Orwell and Empire,” he notes an episode in November 1945—on the very cusp of the Cold War—in which the Duchess of Atholl asked Orwell to speak at a meeting of her League for European Freedom protesting Communist brutality in Yugoslavia. Orwell responded: “I cannot associate myself with an essentially Conservative body which claims to defend democracy in Europe but has nothing to say about British imperialism. [O]ne can only denounce the crimes now being committed in Poland, Jugoslavia etc. if one is equally insistent on ending Britain’s unwanted rule in India. I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence…”

More irony: Hitchens himself was apparently willing to share a bill with Jeanne Kirkpatrick–Reagan’s UN ambassador and a contemporary ideological pillar of empire–at a George Orwell Centenary Conference, held this May at Wellesley College. Unless Hitchens called out Kirkpatrick as inimical to Orwell’s true spirit in his remarks (of which we have not heard), it seems his own standards of who he will “associate himself with” are considerably lower than those of his hero.

It is admittedly a useless exercise, but a bug which has been in my ear since (as a matter of fact) 1984: If Orwell had lived to the see that year, would he have applauded the distribution of his work in Nicaragua, as he did in fact applaud the distribution of Animal Farm in the Soviet Bloc, as a form of resistance to Communist tyranny? Or would he have perceived that his work was being manipulated in a neo-colonialist venture to return Nicaragua to the US orbit? Would he have perceived this in spite of the Sandinistas’ own authoritarian tendencies and pro-Soviet tilt?

If he had lived only a little longer than he actually did, would Orwell have taken sides in the Cold War? Would he have, like post-communist Dwight McDonald in 1952, “chosen the West”? And if he had lived to be a very old man indeed, how would he have viewed the post-Cold War interventions in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq? Some of us Orwell fans would like to think he would be neither among the neo-interventionists such as Hitchens, nor with much of the actually-existing anti-war movement—such as International ANSWER, led at its core by the Stalin-nostalgist Workers World Party, stateside cheerleader for Slobodan Milosevic.

While Hitchens doesn’t mention the Nicaraguan case, he does note approvingly that the opposition in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is making good use of Animal Farm. The book’s serialization in a Zimbabwe opposition newspaper in 2001 was cut short by a bomb attack on the presses—almost certainly the work of the regime. Mugabe is assuredly an anti-democratic thug. But Hitchens fails to note the complexities—that the issue of land reform that Mugabe exploits (however ineptly and cynically) is, in fact, a legitimate one; that the Bush/Blair moves towards intervention in Zimbabwe are, once again, a neo-colonialist campaign.

Even in Russia, where the tyranny of the Czar gave way to that of Stalin—so that the metaphorical farm animals could look “from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which”—a decade after the fall of Communism the New Boss is once again starting to look suspiciously like the Old Boss. In May, when Hitchens was schmoozing with the triumphant anti-Communist Jeanne Kirkpatrick at Wellesley, Yelena Bonner, widow of the famous Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, was protesting that authorities in St. Petersburg were erecting a statue to her late husband—despite a deteriorating human rights climate which he certainly would now be protesting were he alive. “It is out of place to erect a monument to Sakharov in today’s Russia,” she said.

Surprisingly, Hitchens’ book takes no overt swipes at his great nemesis, The Nation’s requisite Orwell-basher, Alexander Cockburn. He even passes up the opportunity to take on Alex’s father Claud Cockburn–who, strangely, is only mentioned in the acknowledgements. Under the pen name of “Frank Pitcairn,” Claud wrote for The Daily Worker about the Spanish war–and was called out in Homage to Catalonia for (not to mince words) lying about Madrid’s crushing of the left-dissident elements in Spain in 1937, portraying the “Trotskyist” group which Orwell’s militia was attached to (the Workers Party of Marxist Unification, or POUM) as a crypto-fascist front.

Hitchens does, to his credit, take on the stickiest question: Did Orwell collaborate with Big Brother? Orwell’s notorious “list” of perceived crypto-Communists and fellow travelers has provided his leftist critics with powerful ammo. Orwell initially drew up the list—consisting almost entirely of public figures he did not know personally—in 1949 for his personal edification. But, as Alex Cockburn took great glee in pointing out in the pages of The Nation, he eventually turned it over to the British government. The affair is an unavoidable one for any contemporary defense of Orwell.

What makes the affair doubly damning is Orwell’s annotation, which took an unhealthy interest in the ethnicity of the figures on the list. After Charlie Chaplin, he scrawled “(Jewish?)” (he wasn’t). This is sleazy stuff, even for something not intended for public consumption. (One thing can be said in Orwell’s defense on this point: his essay “Anti-Semitism in Britain” so successfully exposed the phenomenon by examining how he shared in it–precisely the kind of brutal honesty and moral complexity that his fans admire.)

Embarrassingly, the list accused Paul Robeson of being “Very anti-white”—a crude caricature of his politics. But Robeson indeed was actually too soft on the Soviets—as were many of our culture heroes on the left. Woody Guthrie was not on the list, but maybe he should have been, with his now near-forgotten lyrical homages to Stalin. Is it really mere red-baiting to point this out?

Far more problematic is that Orwell turned the list over to the Information Research Department (IRD) of the British Foreign Office—particularly to one Celia Kirwan, who was his editor at Polemic (and unrequited crush of many years). Kirwan (the twin sister of Arthur Koestler’s wife Mamaine) was apparently connected to the IRD, a burgeoning Cold War propaganda unit.

Hitchens avoids taking on Alex Cockburn’s writing on this question, but focuses on Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, authors of Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, a 1998 history of the IRD. The first (and smallest) point is the authors’ claim that the list was revealed in 1996 by The Guardian. Hitchens says it was actually revealed in Bernard Crick’s 1980 biography George Orwell: A Life. But Crick only mentions that Orwell kept the list–not that he turned it over to Kirwan, the salient point. In fact, none of the numerous references to Kirwan in Crick even note that she worked for the IRD.

Next, Hitchens claims—contrary to the assertions of Lashmar and Oliver—that nobody was “blacklisted” or targeted by the “Thought Police” for being on the list. This is also questionable. The IRD was akin to the US Information Agency—it published and distributed books and articles by intellectuals who were thought to further British imperial interests (or “democracy”—although this takes on an Orwellian meaning in some cases, such as the IRD’s complicity with the CIA-backed coup in Indonesia). Orwell was familiar with such efforts, having served as a BBC war propagandist from 1941-3 (despite profound criticisms of the Allies). In sending the list to Kirwan, he was warning a colleague against promoting writers he felt were Communist dupes. There was clearly a possibility that, at a minimum, these writers would be blacklisted by the IRD! And even if the IRD was not engaged in surveillance, once the list had been passed on to one government office, it could always be forwarded to another–theoretically, to MI6 or even the CIA. In fact, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War details the close links between the IRD and these two sinister agencies.

So if Cockburn overlooks context and disingenuously refers (in The Nation of Dec. 7, 1998) to Kirwan as a “secret agent” (was her work with the IRD secret?), Hitchens is also off the mark to exculpate Orwell on this ugly episode.

It’s again to Hitchens’ credit that he avoids hagiography. He deals forthrightly with Orwell’s downright anti-feminism and undisguised homophobia. Although his 1946 essay “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad” brilliantly presaged ecological politics, Orwell rarely missed an opportunity to diss vegetarians, pacifists, “sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers” (The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 182). Time has not treated these stodgy prejudices as well as it has Orwell’s lonely refusal to accommodate lies and mass murder.

Hitchens also provides worthwhile discussions of Orwell’s “Englishness” and the related question of how his beliefs in clarity and objectivity (at least as an ideal, if not a fully attainable one) set him apart from the Continental philosophers and post-modernists.

But Hitchens makes almost no attempt to apply Orwell’s ideas to the contemporary world situation–even as the ubiquitous surveillance and unending military conflict of 1984 become realities at the dawn of the 21st century. Orwell, despite his many contradictions, may matter more than ever–precisely because an uncompromisingly anti-imperialist, seriously democratic left remains such a marginal prospect as the world moves into a state of permanent war.

Continue ReadingYES, ORWELL MATTERS—BUT DOES CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS? 

IS THIS THE FOURTH WORLD WAR?

James Woolsey and Subcommander Marcos Say Yes

by Bill Weinberg

On September 13, 2001, the New York Times’ Tom Friedman wrote: “Does my country really understand that this is World War III? And if this attack was the Pearl Harbor of World War III, it means there is a long, long war ahead.”

More sophisticated minds have since challenged this declaration as numerically incorrect. While sharing the pro-war consensus, former CIA Director James Woolsey is on the lecture circuit asserting that the global crusade against terrorism is World War IV–the Cold War having been III. “This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us,” Woolsey told a group of UCLA students in April. “Hopefully not the full four-plus decades of the Cold War.”

Woolsey’s mathematics are shared by the unlikeliest of intellectual allies–Subcommander Marcos, verbose spokesman for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas. Marcos issued his communique asserting that the planet is in a “Fourth World War” in 1997–well before the 9-11 attacks. But his analysis illuminates why the new hawks prominently include those such as Friedman, who has made a career of boosting globalization as a boon and inevitability. For Marcos, the Fourth World War is indistinguishable from corporate global integration: “Globalization, neoliberalism as a global system, should be understood as a new war of conquest for territories… A world order returned to the old epochs of the conquests of America, Africa and Oceania. This is a strange modernity that moves forward by going backward. The dusk of the twentieth century has more similarities with previous brutal centuries than with the placid and rational future of some science-fiction novel. In the world of the post-Cold War, vast territories, wealth, and above all, a qualified labor force, await a new owner.”

Significantly, the Maya Indian rebels of the Zapatistas launched their revolt on Jan. 1, 1994, the precise moment that NAFTA took effect. The changes to the Mexican constitution calling for privatization of communal indigenous and peasant lands as a condition of the trade pact were declared a “death sentence” for Mexico’s Indians. These lands–protected as traditional village holdings as a gain of Emilianio Zapata’s peasant insurgency in the Mexican Revolution of 1910-7–now stand to be delivered to the highest multinational bidder. This is the most obvious example of “reconquest of territory” via the legalistic and bureaucratic means of “free trade” policy–or “neoliberalism” by its Latin American moniker.

If war is an extension of policy by other means, then it is axiomatic that Marcos’ “Fourth World War” and Woolsey’s “World War IV” are one and the same. Since 9-11, the war of reconquest has become, to a far greater degree, an actual shooting war.

In the Cold War (“World War III”), “communism” was the official target, but the real targets were often indigenous peoples fighting for their land and resources. The renewed Cold War of the 1980s saw actual genocide against the Maya Indians of Guatemala–as UN investigations have now confirmed. The bloodletting was an effort (largely successful) to force the Indians back into submission before the communist guerillas they had come to support could threaten Guatemala’s landed oligarchy. In World War IV, a “dirty war” has this time come to the Maya lands on the Mexican side of the border, in Chiapas. But the new Zapatista guerillas are proudly indigenist–not communist. And their movement was largely launched to protect their reduced and impoverished landbase from reconquest by triumphalist post-Cold War capital.

There is a double sense in which this is the Fourth World War. The “Fourth World” is a term coined by defenders of indigenous peoples to denote land-based, stateless ethnicities, distinct from the “First,” “Third” or (now non-existent) “Second” worlds. The Center for World Indigenous Studies in Olympia, WA, has been publishing a “Fourth World Journal” that reports on indigenous land struggles worldwide since 1984. In their fourth issue, at the height of the grueling Reagan-era wars for Central America, they published an essay by UC Berkeley geographer (and specialist on Nicaragua’s Miskito Indians) Bernard Nietschmann, who posited a universally overlooked essence to the crisis on the isthmus. Rather than left-versus-right, East-versus-West, communism versus the “Free World,” Nietschmann saw the Central American conflict as primarily one of nations versus states.

In Nietschmann’s eyes, states–whether right-wing like the Guatemalan military dictatorship, or left-wing like the Nicaraguan revolutionary regime–were claiming the land and resources of stateless but distinct nations within their official borders. When these native nations fought back, the offensives launched against them sometimes reached the point of genocide.

Criticizing Henry Kissinger’s 1983 report to the Reagan administration that mapped the White House policy of rolling back Central America’s revolutionary movements, Nietschmann (who died in 1999) wrote: “Not included in the Kissinger Report is mention much less analysis of Maya peoples (more than one-half of Guatemala’s claimed population and territory), who are being invaded and occupied under the guise of economic development. No mention is made of the Miskito, Sumo and Rama nations which have fielded the Americas’ only Indian army and who are fighting Central America’s largest army over Indian control of one-third of Nicaragua’s claimed territory. The report ignores [Panama’s] Kuna who have their own autonomous nation run by the Kunas’ own political, economic and social systems. These are different and distinct from those of Panama, and of the East or West, North of South. Not only does the Kissinger Report overlook the Maya, Miskito or Kuna, it only refers indirectly to indigenous peoples by mentioning Indians three times.”

Like Stalinism in the Cold War, the threat of terrorism is real–and not only to those things in the West which are genuinely worth defending (pluralism, secularism, basic rights for women), but also to indigenous peoples, who are invariably targeted by religious fundamentalists as heathens, much as they are relegated “backward” or “primitive” by globophiles. But the anti-terrorist states of World War IV have a paradoxically incestuous relationship with the Islamic terrorists, which they groomed to fight Communism in the Cold War from Egypt to Palestine to Afghanistan. And the actual targets of the global anti-terror campaign are more frequently indigenous peoples defending their lands from corporate resource plunder than actual terrorists.

The Zapatistas have played their cards very well, fastidiously avoiding targeting civilians, even for the brief period in 1994 when they were “at war” with the Mexican state. They are still perceived as occupying the moral high ground virtually across Mexico’s political spectrum–so it has been impossible for either the US or Mexican governments to effectively label them “terrorists.” But throughout the hemisphere, militarization in the name of counter-terrorism is now used to disenfranchise indigenous peoples.

Most US military aid to Mexico is still in the name of the War on Drugs, which can be seen as a 1990s transition war between the Third and the Fourth, especially in the western hemisphere. In Colombia, the transition has been made from the Drug War to the Terror War–yet the military (supported by the US to the tune of $2 billion since 1996) has been used against U’wa Indians protecting their lands from exploitation by Occidental Petroleum. Under the Andean Initiative (as Bush has dubbed his expanded version of Clinton’s Plan Colombia), military aid is also being distributed to Ecuador–where Shuar and Quichua Indians are resisting Occidental’s new trans-Andean pipeline. Also included is Bolivia–where the Huarani and Aymara Indians are resisting new pipelines being built by Shell and Enron.

In Eurasia and Africa as well, the US-led War on Terror is being unleashed on native peoples who are themselves targets of terror. The Indonesian military is let slip on the native people of Aceh, whose lands are coveted and exploited by Exxon. The Nigerian military defends Chevron and Shell from Ijaw and Itsekiri tribespeople asserting control over their own homelands. In Algeria, the latest recipient of US counter-terrorism aid, the indigenous Berbers are caught between the military dictatorship and the jihadis, both equally hostile to their autonomy demands–while Halliburton and BP-Amoco are assured of security for their oil and gas operations.

In Iraq, Kurds in the north and Ma’adan (“Marsh Arabs”) in the south–as well as Turkomans and Assyrians–are grateful to see the last of Saddam Hussein, who bitterly persecuted them, but pledge to resist the US occupation if they are denied local autonomy in the new order. And the lands of these ethnic minorities include some of the most oil-rich in Iraq.

In the Central Asian heartland now encircled by US and allied troops based in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, some of the most remote land-based cultures on Earth stand to be expropriated by the final thrust of corporate capitalism. The US Energy Department is even funding oil exploration in Siberia–where indigenous peoples such as the Evenks are making a last stand to save their culture from extinction, demanding rights to their ancestral lands from an intransigent Russian government.

And within the United States, the Navajo, Shoshone, Inuit and other native nations who faced the prospect of their lands becoming “National Sacrifice Areas” in the Cold War, to be plundered for their strategic coal and uranium, now face a renewed corporate threat in the atmosphere of economic “liberalization” and emphasis on “energy independence” given war and fear in the Middle East.

This may be the Fourth World War not only by the math of global conflicts since 1914, but because, even more so than the Cold War, it is a war on the Fourth World.

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Center for World Indigenous Studies

Continue ReadingIS THIS THE FOURTH WORLD WAR?