Hosted by Justin Podur
Politics and wars in India and Pakistan
by Badri Raina
first published May 22, 2007
India’s ruling think gurus are forever on the lookout for a smart panacea for what they perceive the country’s ills. In arguing for a two-party political system, the idea seems to be to subdue the proliferation of organic discontent among the lower orders of the polity by imposing a mechanical structural arrangement from the top.
http://www.zcommunications.org/pakistan-in-the-region-by-zia-mian
Zia Mian directs the Project on Peace and Security in South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs, Princeton University. He is a writer and filmmaker on South Asia and nuclear issues. Previous interviews are here:
February 2004
February 2003
I caught up with him by phone on April 27, 2007 – just as the current crisis was beginning.
by Badri Raina
first published in Mainstream Weekly, November 22, 2005
I t is now obvious that the neo-imperialists in America—and their apologists at home here—wish to hard sell the thesis that the Westphalian bedrock (sovereign nation-states, and the principle of non-interference), upon which international relations have been based for over two centuries, must be deemed to have slipped with finality from under the countries of the world.
[GUEST BLOG BY MANDISI MAJAVU]
The other night, the KZN Society of the Arts Gallery invited me to share a panel with Thembinkosi Goniwe — one of the foremost leading art curators in the country, to discuss art and activism in South Africa. It was an exciting exchange.
Below are some of the points that I argued around that night.
As we celebrate 10 years of democracy in South Africa, mainstream intellectuals and critics constantly reminds everyone that we now need to move away from the race question. We are told class analysis is the useful intellectual tool if one is serious about understanding South African society.
In the “art-world”, as Goniwe has argued somewhere, critics dismiss black artist’s work as predictable, monotonous, exhausted, and that black artists are accused of not wanting to go beyond the “comfort zone” of what they have explored over the past ten years.
What is it that makes economists and white critics who can be categorized as progressive not want to acknowledge, and therefore, give legitimacy to the continuing and the necessary race struggle in South Africa?
bell books, an African-American feminist, has this to say about this phenomenon: “Critics who passively absorb white supremacist thinking, and therefore never notice or look at black people on the streets, at their jobs, who render us invisible with their gaze in all areas of daily life, are not likely to produce liberatory theory that will challenge racist domination, or to promote a breakdown in traditional ways of seeing and thinking about reality.”
What bell hooks is saying is that it is silly of us black people to expect white critics to compliment us on “subject-matters” we decide to explore. Instead, we should expect the kind of debilitating criticism that white critics are ever ready to dish out every time we mention race.
If one looks at the South African social movements today, one finds that the word racism to the people in these movements is a taboo. There are a lot of reasons behind this. One reason is ideology. Another reason is the factor of donors. In most cases, donors and ideology tend to go hand-in-hand.
The same logic applies to artists. Artists find themselves compelled to produce what sells. Economic pressure is real for artists, especially black artists in South Africa. As a result of these economic pressures, most artists are forced to make sure that their way of looking at reality corresponds with market forces. And right now the market forces do not really appreciate anything that explores the social construction of race in the new South Africa. This is why we have to applaud those artists who continue to explore this terrain in spite of economic pressures.
In the South African context, it would be foolish of us to ignore race. Given our economic present situation which is informed and shaped by race, it is only honest and it is necessary to address race issues.
An announcement from the indigenous people of Northern Cauca in reaction to recent legislation working its way through the Colombian Congress. The announcement is simple: the indigenous will not obey laws against nature. By saying this, the indigenous are trying to make clear that the legislation is in effect a declaration of war against them. It will be treated as such by them. It should be understood as such by others.
In other Colombia news. Plan Colombia is up for renewal in the US Congress. While it misunderstoods who the corrupters are and what the flow of resources is between Colombia and the US, the McGovern amendment would be a positive development if passed. The proposal by Congresswoman McCollum is below the communique from the indigenous of Cauca.
Author: Indigenous Authorities of Cauca
DECISION OF THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN THE FACE OF LAWS THAT GO AGAINST MOTHER EARTH
June 24, 2005
The Indigenous Regional Council of Cauca (CRIC), the Association of Indigenous Authorities of Northern Cauca (ACIN CWAB WALA KIWE), and the Environmental Economic Authority, in the face of the legislative bills on Waters, Forestry and Mountains that is being processed by the Fifth Commission of the Senate of the Republic,
Based on our customary law, Law 89 of 1890, the rights enshrined in the National Political Constitution of 1991, Articles 3, 7, 63, 67, 246, 329, 286, 330 and on Convention 169 of the ILO ratified by Law 21 of 1991 and Resolution Number 1 of May 1, 2005, emanated in the Twelfth Congress of Indigenous Peoples of Cauca,
We declare our opposition as peoples and Indigenous Authorities of Cauca to the legislative bills on Waters, Forestry, and Moors that are being processed in the Senate of the Republic. We do so because these bills have as their fundamental purpose that of making possible and legalizing the CONCESSION of the waters, forests, and moors, that is to say, of all of LIFE, to private corporate interests so that they, driven by their insatiable global egoism, may exploit them for their benefit, converting them into profits at the cost of abusing and destroying them and along with them the balance and harmony that guarantees their survival and that of us peoples and cultures who coexist with them in our lands.
Furthermore, for us indigenous peoples rooted in our cosmovision, the forest, the moor, and the springs of water are sacred spaces of life in which the spirits live, and it is, therefore, unthinkable to engage in extractive and/or intensive productive activities in them. These sacred spaces are visited by traditional doctors to learn from the spirits and to gather medicinal and/or magical plants to strengthen culture and to harmonize life. From the concept of the holism, the unity of the indigenous people involves the spirits, people, plants, animals, water, soil, and other forces such as thunder and rain, among others, as integral elements of the system of life and existence. Its purpose, therefore, is for the use and sustainable contribution to the dignified life of the communities in harmony with nature and not for the accumulation of capital.
Each being has its place and is in relationship with other beings and places in rhythms and processes that must be recognized and respected with wisdom and conscience. That relationship of wisdom with rhythm and the place of all beings that make up life is the law of origin. To violate it or do it violence for any motive is the greatest crime possible against Mother Earth, its beings, and its rhythms. The purposes and powers that are designing the current legislative bills and which respond to the interests of transnational accumulation are by principle incapable of recognizing and respecting the rhythms and places of beings and their coexistence. For this reason, they are a threat to peoples and territories and go against LIFE.
On the other hand, these legislative bills are grounded in an ignorance of the content of Article 1 of Law 99 of 1993, which in its Numbers 2, 3, and 4 proclaims the rights and duties with respect to the ecosystemic and cultural biodiversity of the country: Number 2. “The biodiversity of the country, because it is a national patrimony and of interest to humanity, must be protected as a priority and used in a sustainable way. Number 3. “Policies will take into account the rights of human beings to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature.” Number 4. “The zones of moors, sub-moors, the springs of water and the areas of replenishment of the aquifers will receive special protection.” Number 5. “In the use of water resources, human consumption will have priority above any other use.”
We know that these bills are being articulated to the negotiation and signing of the Free Trade Agreement and all of the other strategies geared towards favoring the interests of transnational capital and promoted by foreign governments and multilateral entities with the purpose of privatizing the life of the planet in all corners to exploit it and transform it into a commodity and profit and destroying it in the process. For this reason, we know that these bills do not come from Colombia nor are they only for Colombia. They are global laws that respond to transnational interests and powers, which also promote war, looting, and deception and which have disguised their intentions from the time of the conquest with discourses of protection and respect through the falsehood of the propaganda of pretty words. The history of the blood and death of the conquest and concessions is not new: that is why we can recognize it behind the mask of lies and false promises of protection, welfare, development, and progress.
As a result, rooted in our Law of Origin, we demand that the Colombian people be consulted in advance about these legislative bills. We reiterate our call on international solidarity, on the peoples of the world and on organizations and people committed to the defense of life and of Mother Earth, to actively give us backing, so that our just demands be respected by the National Government and by the multinational interests who promote and represent and who come to strip us of our ancestral lands and knowledge. We do not understand, we do not accept, and we reject as criminal the concession of life to the multinationals. It is our clear duty to struggle and defend the rights of the peoples who defend life and their natural resources since they are not and will never be up for sale.
We announce to the Government, to the People of Colombia, and to the world our decision to disobey and ignore the laws that violate the right to Life and our Law of Origin, because we cannot accept orders from those who promote death.
WITH A COPY TO: PRESIDENT ALVARO URIBE VELEZ, SENATE OF THE REPUBLIC, MINISTRY OF THE ENVIRONMENT, HOUSING, AND TERRITORIAL DEVELOPMENT, MULTINATIONALS AND NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS.
CONGRESSWOMAN MCCOLLUM’S INITIATIVE REGARDING PLAN COLOMBIA
Congresswoman Betty McCollum
McGovern Amendment to Reduce Military Aid to Colombia by $100 Million
June 28, 2005
1
Mr. Chair, the McGovern Amendment to cut $100 million from Plan Colombia is about accountability and sending a message that cutting deals with narcotics traffickers who pose as politicians will not be tolerated by the American tax payer.
After six years and over $4 billion dollars, Plan Colombia is not reducing the supply of cocaine on our streets, but has succeeded in making cocaine in America cheaper, more available and more potent than ever before.
The drug war in Colombia is failing – failing the people of Colombia and the American taxpayer. Spending another $735 million to stay the wrong course and continue to finance failure is irresponsible. Let us send a message to Colombia that there are no more blank checks in American taxpayers’ checkbook.
Unfortunately, Plan Colombia has not made the Colombian people any safer. More than 2 million Colombians have been forced to flee their homes, 90% of violent crimes – murders and rapes – go unpunished, and human rights abuses among Colombia’s military and law enforcement are all too common.
These are deeply disturbing trends. There is cheaper cocaine on America’s streets, millions of innocent people fleeing for their lives, and lawlessness. This is hardly what we could call “good governance.” In return for the narco-terrorism and corruption, the American taxpayers are being asked to reward the Colombian government.
Now, a law passed by Colombia’s Congress and supported by President Uribe provides immunity and protection for right-wing death squads and narco-terrorists.
For ending their participation in death squads, Colombia will be giving virtual immunity and protection from extradition to narco-traffickers, many under indictment in the United States.
One paramilitary death squad, the AUC earns 70% of its income from narcotics trafficking and the AUC is listed as an official terrorist organization by the U.S. Government. The AUC’s leader, Diego Murillo, is described as a “brutal paramilitary warlord who made a fortune in the drug trade.”
Under the plan for disarmament supported by our allies in Bogotá, Murillo and terrorists like him who have committed massacres, kidnappings, drug trafficking and the murders of elected officials receive freedom from prosecution – and keep possession of their riches.
In Colombia, if crime pays, if drug trafficking pays and if terrorism pays – let’s not have the American tax payer pay for it. Congress needs to cut funding for Plan Colombia – save the American taxpayers $100 million and send a message that Colombia cannot protect narco-terrorists with our tax dollars. I strongly urge my colleagues to support the McGovern Amendment.
There is something peculiar about the way colonialism works today. The most sophisticated colonial projects use the rhetoric of human rights, democracy, and even anti-racism in their favour. This has a profoundly immobilizing effect on those who are actually trying to support struggles for self-determination. All the ‘democracy promotion’ that’s been going on at the hands of the US in recent years is a case in point. A very important example is ‘Reporters Without Borders’. Take a look at Salim Lamrani’s article on that institution, and you will see what I mean. Serious anti-imperialists are going to have to do some serious thinking about how to deal with all this stuff. It is very important in demobilizing our potential constituency.
Thanks Kole for holding it down over the past few days.
I would re-write Voltaire’s ‘Candide’. It’s a great little book – Voltaire’s writing in the 18th century (I think). The opening scene has this professor Pangloss explaining how everything is for the best and that this world is the best of all possible worlds. Then the main character, Candide, undergoes a series of disasters that were all quite routine for people at that time.
I think a re-write of such a book would be quite appropriate. Candidates for Pangloss abound, from Francis Fukuyama to any of the more upbeat right-wing types in the US. And think of all the disasters the modern Candide could undergo? You don’t need to use your imagination. In fact, Jonathan Schwarz has put together an absurdly tragic story of an Iranian family who just lost their jobs. That’s at Under the Same Sun. Check the cartoon too.
Years ago, I wrote an essay arguing against nation-states as a form of organization. Admittedly not the most immediately practical program or campaign, it was an attempt to grapple with the various problems that nationalism and states based on nationalism have caused in the world. Among these problems: the genocidal campaigns national states and settler states waged (and continue to wage) against indigenous peoples, of the suppression of the aspirations of ethnic or religious minorities that is almost always implied in national states based on a particular identity being adopted as that of the nation; of the difficult and often brutal conditions lived by millions of migrant workers who are stuck without rights or protections because they lack precious papers, citizenship rights – they don’t belong to the nation they’re in. That previous essay argued for citizenship based on democratic principles, resource rights based on principles of justice and equality, and resolution of conflicts by inter-state consensus (1).
In a recent debate on Israel/Palestine, Chomsky raised an idea of something similar, what he calls a: “no-state settlement, generalizing multinationalism (in the broad sense indicated) beyond the borders of a state. That approach would be based on the recognition that the nation-state system has been one of the must brutal and destructive creations of Europe and its offshoots, imposed by force on much of the rest of the world, with horrendous consequences for centuries in Europe, and elsewhere until the present. For the region, it would mean reinstating some of the more sensible elements of the Ottoman system (though, obviously, without its intolerable features), including local and regional autonomy, elimination of borders and free transit, sharply diminishing or eliminating military forces, etc. Applied elsewhere, say to North America, it would entail, to mention just one example, reversing Clinton’s post-NAFTA militarization of the (previously quite porous) Mexico-US border, with a severe human cost, and dealing in some humane way with the fact that the US is sitting on half of Mexico, acquired by brutal conquest. Similar issues arise throughout the world.”
Looking back, I ought to have read the writing on the wall a little more carefully. That essay was published well after 9/11, after the invasion of Afghanistan by the US, and after the coup attempt against Venezuela. In other words, there was ample evidence that the really existing alternative to a world of sovereign nation-states is a world of naked imperial aggression. A global “no-state settlement” along the lines Chomsky described recently or that I tried to present those years ago would still be nice. But it seems to me that in the world today – and I came to this opinion reluctantly — national sovereignty is a progressive force.
Had the anti-war movement and anti-imperialist opposition in the United States and elsewhere in the first world been stronger, things might be different. But our inability to channel the energy and anger that the whole world expressed on February 15, 2003, into a force capable of stopping the invasion and devastation of Iraq, the indifference of so much of the same anti-imperialist movement to the coup and ongoing slaughter in Haiti, the repeated capitulation of the best endowed parts of our movement to ineffective actions or collaboration with imperialism, suggests a need for sober reflection and re-assessment – of strategy, tactics, and goals.
The United States had plans to replace Chavez in Venezuela with pliant elites. It had plans to use occupied Iraq as a jumping off point to invasions of Syria, Iran, and beyond. I don’t want to devalue the role of anti-imperial sentiment and opposition, or act as if it makes no difference. It does make a difference. But if the US agenda was stopped or slowed in Venezuela or Iraq, it was not because of internationalists. It is because of nationalists, who fought and continue to fight for their national sovereignty. In Iraq, parts of this nationalist resistance has ugly tactics and an ugly program. But it is fighting something even uglier, and if we don’t like it, it is up to us, who are supposed to be in a better position to do so, to come up with a better way to stop the empire.
In Venezuela to date, the defense of sovereignty has not only been effective, but it has not been ugly at all. Instead, it has been inclusive, humane, and genuinely democratic – certainly more so than the United States or most other countries. The open, democratic character of the Venezuelan process might render it vulnerable, but it is also its strength. The Venezuelan experience suggests that there doesn’t have to be a conflict between national sovereignty and democracy. If that’s the case, perhaps the struggle for the moment isn’t an aggressive attempt to push towards a “no-state settlement”, but a defensive one, against imperialism and for the kind of world proclaimed in the United Nations Charter: a world of sovereign nation-states, self-determination within those states, and co-operation between them. After March 2003, even getting to that world seems a long struggle.
Even if you accept the defense of national sovereignty against imperialist depredation for third world countries, is the same true for the first world? Wouldn’t everyone be better off if US citizens loved their country a little less and loved the rest of the world a little more? Probably. But perhaps there is no contradiction here either. The Michael Moore phenomenon, for example, is powerful because he seems to start from a sincere love of the US and goes from there (sometimes not far enough from there) to a concern for the many victims of the US. The idea that a country like the US or Canada ought to concentrate on solving its own political, social, and cultural problems and developing its own people with its own resources (as opposed to resources plundered from all over the world) would not only resonate with many North Americans, it would also imply a radical change in world affairs (military bases closing down, assets and infrastructure being returned to the nations that they belong to, etc.). And as wonderful as globalism and internationalism is, it is hard to think that such a development would be anything but positive. Indeed, it would be the basis for internationalism that isn’t based on exploitation and inequality. Perhaps it is even the necessary first step towards a global “no-state settlement” for a better future.
Justin Podur is a writer and activist. Feedback on this essay is particularly welcome: write to justin.podur@utoronto.ca
Notes
1) “Instead of Nation States” http://www.zmag.org/Sustainers/content/2002-05/28podur.cfm
First Published in “People’s Democracy”, the weekly organ of the CPI(M) August 29, 2004, vol. XXVIII, no. 35.
Readers have probably heard that Sonia Gandhi will not be the Prime Minister of India. In some ways this is a good thing: she was going to be the leader of India because of her last name. But she is being replaced by Manmohan Singh, the man most associated with neoliberalism in India (again it is worth remembering that Sonia Gandhi got her last name by marriage to Rajiv Gandhi, and the neoliberal opening of India begun under Rajiv Gandhi). Less important,, it would have been kind of nice that India could have a Prime Minister who was born in another country and have it be no big deal.
But of course, the BJP, now in opposition, made it a big deal. Arundhati Roy, in an interview with Amy Goodman, describes what happened:
“What has happened is that as soon as the election results were announced, the BJP, the hard-right wing members of the BJP and its goon squads started saying we’ll shave our heads. We’ll eat green gram and make a revolution in this country against this foreign woman on the one hand, and on the other hand, equally hard core corporate groups were acting — they were out on the streets. They were yelling like fundamentalists would, and all of these corporate television channels had split screens where on the one hand, you saw what is happening in Sonia Gandhi’s house and on the other half, you just had what the stockbrokers are saying. And the whole of the one billion people who had voted had just been forgotten. They had been given their photo opportunity, their journeys on elephant back and camel and whatever it was to the election booth. Now they were just forgotten. The only comments you get are what the industrialists think… and what the centrists think about Sonia Gandhi. It is an absolutely absurd kind of blackmail by fascists on the one hand and corporate fascists on the other.”
The day after the election, Sudhanva Deshpande published a ZNet Commentary analyzing the election results, the growth of the left, and the fall of the BJP. To Deshpande, it is the Indian left, of which he is a part, that is the key: If “the Left fails to grow, the historic verdict of this election will become a mere hiccup in the rise of Indian fascism.”
I think that is right. I was very happy to see the BJP gone. But the real battle for India is only just starting…