Zapatistas Criticize Mexico’s Stance on Ukraine War

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Most people have probably forgotten about Mexico’s Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), the insurgents who captured the world’s attention on New Year’s Day 1994. But they haven’t disappeared and have recently even criticized the Mexican government for its position on the war in Ukraine.

In 1994, the Zapatistas, named after Emiliano Zapata, the agrarian reformer in the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, took up arms in the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas, a largely Mayan and impoverished region. Zapatista ideology synthesized traditional Mayan practices with elements of anarchism and socialism.

The EZLN had been established in Chiapas in 1983 by a group of activists from the National Liberation Forces (FLN), a leftist militant organization formed in the state of Monterrey in 1969. Led by “Subcomandante Marcos” (Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente), between 2,500 and 4,000 Zapatista indigenous militia stormed San Cristobal and three other large towns in the state.

Some 15,000 federal troops poured into Chiapas in the following days, and the violence of the initial government response contributed to public outrage, including a demonstration of two hundred thousand protesters in Mexico City.

Both sides de-escalated the violence and in February 1996, the San Andrés Accords were signed between the Mexican government and the Zapatistas, granting autonomy, recognition, and other rights to the indigenous population of Mexico.

Though they have never been implemented, in 2001 the Mexican Congress passed the Indigenous Law, a watered down version of the Accords. By 2017, more than 250,000 people lived in 27 autonomous Zapatista municipalities in Chiapas and that number increased by eleven in 2019.

Since being elected president of Mexico in 2018, the left-wing populist Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, who has throughout his career supported indigenous rights, has proposed incorporating the San Andrés Accords into the Mexican constitution, indicating his interest in establishing trust with the Zapatistas. He also approved the 2019 expansion of Zapatista territory.

Although the Zapatistas do not occupy the place they once did in the popular imagination, they continue to be an important reference point for social movements in Mexico and around the world.

While never formally laying down its weapons, the EZLN has become known more for its peaceful mobilizations, dialogue with civil society, and structures of political, economic, and cultural autonomy.

For example, thousands of indigenous supporters of the Zapatistas in Chiapas demonstrated on March 13 against “all capitalist wars” in Chiapas, where they showed solidarity with Ukraine. They marched in the cities that the guerrillas took in 1994: San Cristobal de las Casas, Palenque, Margaritas and Ocosingo.

They demanded an end to the war in Ukraine. “Out with the Russian army from Ukraine that disintegrates families,” was one of the slogans of the contingent, which was estimated at 5,000 people. The men wearing balaclavas also chanted slogans such as “Yes to life,” “No more persecution for those who fight for life,” “Let the capitalist system die” and “Stop the war.”

They had called for this massive protest after the Russian invasion of Ukraine that began on Feb. 24. Prior to the protest, they circulated a manifesto denouncing the “aggressor force, the Russian army. There are interests of big capital at stake.”

The EZLN argued that “those who win in this war are the big arms consortiums and the big capitals that see the opportunity to conquer, destroy and rebuild territories.” It also criticized the inability of Europe, the United States and other powers to stop the war.

The Zapatista demonstration came as Mexico, which sits on the United Nations Security Council, faced pressure to take a stronger stance against Russia. The nation’s response to the war has been mixed. President Lopez Obrador declared that Mexico would remain neutral in the conflict.

He condemned the Russian invasion but has refused to apply economic sanctions against Moscow, which Ukraine’s ambassador to Mexico, Oksana Dramarétska, requested on March 10. The Mexican government also announced it would not send arms to Ukraine, after Ukrainian authorities asked the country for military assistance.

However, Mexico has played a proactive role at the United Nations. The UN General Assembly March 24 overwhelmingly approved a resolution, proposed by France and Mexico, blaming Russia for the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and urging an immediate cease-fire and protection for millions of civilians.

The resolution “strongly encourages the continued negotiations between all parties, and again urges the immediate peaceful resolution of the conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine through political dialogue, negotiations, mediation and other peaceful means in accordance with international law.”

On May 6, in a Security Council statement co-authored by Mexico and Norway, the Council expressed strong support for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ efforts in the search for a peaceful solution.

In a statement on the 212^th anniversary of Mexican independence, delivered on Sept. 16, Lopez Obrador presented his proposal for the establishment of a High-Level Caucus for Dialogue and Peace in Ukraine. In a follow-up presentation to the Security Council on Sept. 22, and later to the General Assembly, Secretary of Foreign Affairs Marcelo Ebrard formally presented Mexico’s proposal.

However, some in Lopez Obrador’s governing party, the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), adopted a more pro-Russian stance. About a half-dozen members in Congress created a “Mexico-Russia Friendship Committee” March 23 and applauded Russian Ambassador Viktor Koronelli after he addressed them. 

 

 

A Horrific Mass Murder

Should Putin’s Russia be blamed for a genocide 90 years ago?

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

On Nov. 26 Ukraine observed Holodomor Memorial Day, commemorating the Soviet induced famine organized by Communist dictator Joseph Stalin that left some four million Ukrainians dead. It has been recognized by the European Parliament as a “crime against humanity.”

“The Holodomor of 19321933 was a genocide of the Ukrainian people,” Ukrainian presidential official Andriy Yermak recently stated. “The Russians will pay for all of the victims of the Holodomor and answer for today’s crimes.” He added that Russia now “wants to organize Holodomor 2.0.”

The famine was officially denied by the former Soviet Union until 1987. In 2006, a sovereign Ukraine recognized it as genocide.

Surely no one can deny that this was a horrific mass murder, though today’s Russia views it as a tragedy that affected the Soviet Union as a whole. Moscow considers it one of the many horrors the Communist rulers conducted against all the peoples of the Soviet Union, including the Russians themselves.

MONSTROUS REGIME

We in the west, though, have decided to condemn a country that, thanks to its current reprehensible behaviour, we also now retroactively accuse of crimes committed by a predecessor state almost a century ago – at a time when its own ethnic majority nationality was also victimized by the same monstrous regime.

So, although the crime was carried out by the Communists who ruled the USSR, led by Joseph Stalin, himself a Georgian, we consider “Russia” responsible, though the Soviet Communist Party was an ideological, not ethnic, organization.

The famine began in the chaos of collectivization in 1929 when millions of people were forced to join state farms, and Ukraine was seen as a source of capital that could be used to build a modern industrial Soviet Union.

Crops were confiscated to sell abroad while people starved. Ukraine paid the price, because 70 per cent of exported Soviet grain was accounted for by that region, since it was the breadbasket of the country.

Collectivization led to a drop in production, the disorganization of the rural economy, and food shortages, because the Soviet Communist Party set impossibly high quotas for the amount of grain Ukrainian villages were required to contribute to the Soviet state.

When they were unable to meet the quotas, authorities confiscated even the seeds set aside for planting. Special teams were sent to search homes and even seize other foodstuffs. Starving farmers attempted to flee their villages, but Soviet authorities apprehended them. This sparked a series of rebellions, including armed uprisings.

DESTROYED POPULATIONS

One problem with the version of the Holodomor that sees it only in the context of specifically targeting Ukrainians is that similar actions also led to mass starvation elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Millions of other nationalities – including, for that matter, Russians – also starved to death.

Approximately 1.5 million people died in Kazakhstan, an estimated 38 to 42 per cent of all Kazakhs, actually the highest percentage of any ethnic group killed by the Soviet famine.

The famine was indeed a form of genocide, but one mainly targeting an economic class. It forced peasants into submission and drove them into the collective farms, to ensure a steady supply of grain to sell abroad.

Stalin was an ideologue, not a racial nationalist – he was destroying his own populations, regardless of ethnicity, in order to “build a Communist society.” The USSR officially targeted peasants as a social class, not a national or ethnic group, though Ukrainians were its main victims.

Oddly, turning this into an ethnic conflict also lets the totalitarian Communists off the hook. It was the “bad Russians” who were culpable. It’s almost like blaming all Germans, not mainly Hitler’s Nazis, for the Holocaust.

BLAMING MOSCOW

Also, speaking of Nazis, if we are to recall novelist William Faulkner’s famous line that “the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past,” what should we then say about those Ukrainians involved in the murder of over one million Jews in Ukraine during the Second World War? This genocide, more recent than the Holodomor, was indeed “racial.”

In 2010 the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, a leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) that killed, apart from Jews, some 100,000 Poles in 1943-45, was named a “Hero of Ukraine.” In 2016, though, the Polish parliament recognized the massacres as genocide. Are we then to also accuse today’s Ukraine as guilty of genocide?

The Holodomor was indeed a monstrous crime, carried out under the aegis of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – an organization made up of members of every one of that Bolshevik empire’s national groups, including, of course, Ukrainian Communists.

The famine was a genocide caused by a regime indifferent to death, similar to those in British-ruled Ireland in the 1840s and in Bengal, India in 1943, as opposed to those mass murders which were intentionally designed to destroy an ethnic group. This is not a distinction without a difference, though both are equally horrific.

Finally, if linking Putin’s Russia to the Holodomor is valid, why have we waited so long to bring it to the world’s attention? The post-soviet Russian state is now 31 years old, after all. Is it just a “coincidence” that we are only now blaming Moscow for this Soviet Communist atrocity - when we just happen to be in an undeclared war with Russia?