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.

###

Center for World Indigenous Studies

Continue ReadingIS THIS THE FOURTH WORLD WAR? 

U.S.-INDIA TERROR SUMMIT: WHO IS THE ENEMY?

by Bill Weinberg

“Osama bin Laden will be caught anytime—today or tomorrow.”

So said J. Cofer Black, US State Department coordinator for counter-terrorism, after meeting with officials in Bangladesh Sept. 5. Black boasted to reporters that 75 percent of al-Qaeda elements have been killed or arrested already, while a well-planned campaign is underway to eliminate the rest of the organization.

Black had just come from an anti-terror summit in the Indian capital, New Delhi, and broached the possibility of forming a joint Bangladesh-US working group on terrorism modeled on those the US has formed with India and Pakistan. (The New Nation, Bangladesh, Sept. 5)

At the Sept. 1 meeting of the US-India Joint Working Group on Terrorism, Black met with Meera Shankar, under-secretary for international security in the Ministry Of External Affairs, for talks focusing on cross-border terrorist operations and arms and narcotics trafficking in the region.

“The destabilizing impact of these linkages is a matter of growing concern to both countries,” said the joint statement released after the meeting. “Both sides agreed that, even as the challenge posed by international terrorism continues to mutate, it is important for the international community to strengthen counter-terrorism cooperation to effectively meet this challenge.”

New training and intelligence-sharing programs were also discussed, expanding the mission of the Joint Working Group, first established in 2000. (Indo-Asian News Service, Sept. 1)

But India’s new “anti-terrorism” prowess is more likely to be used against ethnic guerilla armies fighting for independence in the country’s remote eastern corner than against al-Qaeda or related groups said to be operating in disputed Jammu and Kashmir in the north. The counter-insurgency wars India has waged in this forgotten region, sandwiched between Burma and Bangladesh, have claimed perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives since Indian independence in 1947. The neighboring states of Assam and Nagaland have been hardest hit—and the conflict in Assam is now rapidly escalating.

The United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) is said to be responsible for a bomb that went off at an Indian Independence Day parade Aug. 15 in the Assam town of Dhemaji, killing 15, including seven children, and wounding several more. A second blast left 12 wounded. On Aug. 26, near-simultaneous bomb blasts on a train, bus station and oil refinery in Assam left dead six and over 70 wounded. That same day, a woman said to be a ULFA militant was arrested in the Dhemaji attack.

The rebel groups in Assam and Nagaland accuse the Indian government of illegally occupying their lands and even of genocide against the region’s peoples, as well as the plunder of oil, timber and other natural resources with little return to the impoverished residents. They maintain that the region was illegally annexed to India in 1947 and denied self-determination. But the recent targeting of civilians by the ULFA has led to tensions within the coalition that unites many of the region’s guerilla armies.

The faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland led by S.S. Khaplang (NSCN-K) strongly criticized the ULFA for the Aug. 15 attack. “The crime perpetrated against innocent school children by ULFA in Assam is unacceptable and we are not going to remain a silent spectator to any organization that…advocates terrorism,” K. Mulatonu, a senior NSCN-K leader, told Indo-Asian News Service by telephone from Mon in Nagaland. “We will be forced and compelled to sever all relationships with ULFA if they do not stop the genocide and fratricidal killings immediately.”

The NSCN-K is among the oldest and the most powerful of nearly 30 guerilla armies operating in India’s northeast. It uses territory across the border in Burma (Myanmar) as a staging ground, and seeks to unite Naga lands on both sides of the border as an independent state. The NSCN-K and the rival NSCN-IM (led by Isak Chisi Swu and Thuingaleng Muivah), have maintained a ceasefire with New Delhi since 1991, but Khaplang now heads an umbrella coalition of several guerilla armies, including ULFA–most of which are not covered by the ceasefire.

“We had maintained a good relationship with ULFA for more than 10 years now,” Mulatonu said. “We provided arms training to ULFA in our camps in Myanmar. We still have about 100 ULFA cadres sheltered in our camps in Myanmar.”

He said that top NSCN-K commanders are expected to meet ULFA leaders soon to discuss the recent violence in Assam. “We will soon meet the ULFA top brass to get a first-hand account of what is happening and prevail upon them to desist from such acts of genocide,” Mulatonu said.

The NSCN-K recently offered to broker peace talks between ULFA and New Delhi, even as Nagaland’s own status remains uncertain. At least 25,000 people have died in the insurgency in Nagaland, a state of two million people, since Indian independence. (IANS, Aug. 21)

Indian intelligence often portrays the guerillas in the east as being backed by Pakistan and Islamic militant groups. But Assam is overwhelmingly Hindu, and Nagaland is a mostly Christian enclave. The guerillas’ roots are generally in the Maoist movements that shook India in the 1970s, and their concerns are now with ethnic and regional self-government, not religion.

The Indian army’s paramilitary auxiliary in the region, the Assam Rifles, is currently embroiled in a scandal concerning human rights abuses. On July 16, security forces used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse a protest by women in Manipur state who were demanding that the paramilitary outfit be withdrawn following accusations that riflemen had raped and killed a local woman. Many of the woman protesters stripped naked to shame the security forces. The violence culminated a two-day general strike to demand withdrawal of the Assam Rifles from Manipur. (India Daily, July 16)

RESOURCES

ULFA Web site:

http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/congress/7434/ulfa.htm

South Asia Terrorism Portal (anti-terrorist think-tank) page on ULFA:

http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/states/assam/terrorist_outfits/Ulf
a.htm

Free Nagaland homepage:

http://www.angelfire.com/mo/Nagaland/

South Asia Terrorism Portal page on NSCN-K:

http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/states/nagaland/terrorist_outfits/
Nscn_k.htm

For more on the Assam struggle, see WW3 REPORT #94:

/static/94.html#subcontinent1

For more on J. Cofer Black, see WW3 REPORT #18:

/static/18.html#afghan11

(Bill Weinberg)
—————————

Special to WORLD WAR 3 REPORT, Sept. 6, 2004
Reprinting permissible with attribution

WW3Report.com

Continue ReadingU.S.-INDIA TERROR SUMMIT: WHO IS THE ENEMY?