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MEMOIRS OF A TIBETAN MARXIST

Middle Ground Between Mao and the Dalai Lama?

by William Wharton, WW4 Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RESOURCES

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue ReadingMEMOIRS OF A TIBETAN MARXIST 

TIBET: ROOTS OF THE UNREST

Colonization and Resistance on the Roof of the World

by Carole Reckinger, Toward Freedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This story first appeared March 24 in Toward Freedom.

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

SOURCES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From our daily report:

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

Continue ReadingTIBET: ROOTS OF THE UNREST 

MAPPING THE COMPLICITY OF ISRAELI ARCHITECTURE

from NOT BORED!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—-

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

RESOURCES

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

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

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

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

B’Tselem
http://www.btselem.org/

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

From our daily report:

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

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

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

From our archive:

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

——————-

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

Continue ReadingMAPPING THE COMPLICITY OF ISRAELI ARCHITECTURE 

INTERVIEW: THE KING OF NUBIA

Sheikh Anwar McKeen on the Struggle in Sudan

from the Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SAM: Yes, that’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PLW: From the Bible…

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

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

SAM: Yes, that’s right.

BW: Were you there at the time?

SAM: Yes, I was there.

BW: You were born and grew up in Sudan?

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

BW: What does Zinjarab mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BW: This was when?

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

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

PLW: Dede Obombasa, are you also from Nubia?

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

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

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

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

PLW: This is a New York-based NGO?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DO: Yes…

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

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

DO and SAM: Yes!

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

PLW: They are tarikas? Sufi orders?

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

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

SAM: No, he was made by the British!

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

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

PLW: …Along with 200,000 Sudanese.

SAM: Yes, in 1885.

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

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

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

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

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

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

PLW: Are they pure Arab, these families?

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

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

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

BW: But would the child be born into slavery?

DO and SAM: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

SAM: Iran and Iraq.

PLW: Oh, both! [Laughter]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PLW: Which people? The Fur…?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PLW: To the Khartoum regime…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SAM: Yes, until we organize ourselves.

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

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

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

PLW: Would you say they are the true rulers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BW: To sort of whitewash the situation…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DO and SAM: Aleikum Salaam!

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Resources:

Rescue Nubia
http://www.rescuenubia.org

Nuba Survival
http://www.nubasurvival.com

Save Darfur
http://www.savedarfur.org

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

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

From our daily report:

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

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

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

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

See also:

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

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

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

Continue ReadingINTERVIEW: THE KING OF NUBIA