An Italian Political Crisis

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

 

Italy’s populist parties reacted with fury on May 27 when their attempts to form a government broke down after the country’s president vetoed their choice of finance minister, a harsh critic of the European Union’s common currency, the euro.

Under Italian law, the president has the right to reject the appointment of a cabinet member, but his decision angered the two-party populist coalition.

Nearly three months after a general election on March 4, hopes that the country would have a government formed by Luigi di Maio’s anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the nationalist euro-sceptic League led by Matteo Salvini, were dashed.

The two parties were set to form Western Europe’s first populist government, and wanted Paolo Savona, an economist and banker who has been highly critical of the euro, to join their government.

Together, they won more than half of the overall vote and insisted that their choice of cabinet ministers was an essential part of their democratic mandate.

But Sergio Mattarella, Italy’s nominally non-partisan president, saw otherwise, blocking Savona for the portfolio. He warned that Savona posed a risk “for Italian families and their savings.” Italy has second-highest debt level in the EU, after Greece.

Salvini has asked for a new election. “In a democracy, if we are still in democracy, there’s only one thing to do, let the Italians have their say,” he told supporters in a speech.

He called the crisis the death throes of a political establishment intent on keeping Italy “enslaved.”

Di Maio, too, called the rejection unacceptable. “It's an institutional clash without precedent” and “the darkest night of Italian democracy.” 

What was the point of voting, he asked, “if ratings agencies” make the decisions. He wants Mattarella to be impeached.

Adding fuel to the fire, EU Budget Commissioner Guenther Oettinger on May 29 told a reporter he hoped financial markets would teach Italians not to vote for populists.

Salvini called Oettinger’s comments “threatening” and showed a “German desire for hegemony and control.” He warned Brussels against meddling.

Savona has described the euro as a “German cage” for Italy. Not one to mince words, he has accused Berlin of trying to achieve by economic means what it failed to do in the Second World War -- the domination of Europe. 

This will be seen by many Italians as a Davos-instigated “coup d’état” by a ostensibly non-partisan head of state against a legally constituted coalition government. 

Many Italians what happened in 2011 during a previous economic crisis, when Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was ousted and replaced by former EU commissioner Mario Monti.

That suspicion will be strengthened by Mattarella’s decision to ask Carlo Cottarelli, a former official with the International Monetary Fund, to form a caretaker government.

All of this moves the troubled EU, of which Italy is a founding member and its fourth-largest economy. With Italy challenging its unity, the EU is now a step closer to disintegrating.

California and Texas: Two Polar Opposites

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright, author of the new book God Save Texas, maintains that America’s two largest states, Cali­fornia and Texas, are the poles between which American society turns. 

Both are giants. Of the top ten cities in the United States, California and Texas have three each.

The gross domestic product of California is US$2.6 trillion, which would make it the world’s fifth-largest economy. Texas, at US$1.6 trillion, would have the tenth-largest economy in the world if it were a country. Both would eclipse Canada. 

“They are the most ambitious states in the union, each reaching for the steering wheel as America lurches into the future,” Wright contends. They also “define the vivid political divide that besets the country. Whichever is in the ascendant tends to pull politics in its direction.”

Home to such liberal outposts as Los Angeles and San Francisco, Californians in 2016 voted for Hillary Clinton, at 61.7 per cent, at a rate higher than any other state save Hawaii, and she won its 55 Electoral College votes. 

She gained four million votes more than Donald Trump in the Golden State, the main reason she won the overall popular vote. 

Even Orange County, once the seedbed of right-win Republicanism, voted Democratic -- for the first time since Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide victory in 1936.

President Trump, on the other hand, did worse, at 31.6 per cent, than Herbert Hoover, at 37.4 per cent, did against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, during the Depression.  

Ever since Bill Clinton won California in 1992, it has voted for Democratic presidential candidates by steadily increasing majorities.

Seen by most Californians as a virtual enemy, Trump didn’t even bother visiting the state during his first 13 months in office.

California appears to be, as the title of a new book by Manuel Pastor, a professor of sociology and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles indicates, a “State of Resistance.”

From Governor Jerry Brown downwards, California today doesn’t have a single Republican elected by a statewide vote. There may be no Republican candidate for governor or United States senator on the state’s ballot this November. 

That’s because candidates compete in open, nonpartisan primaries, and the two candidates who get the most votes, regardless of party, advance to the November general election.

It would be the first election since 1914 where a major party had no candidate in either the race for senator or for governor.

The state is in open defiance against many federal policies, a jurisdiction where municipal and state officials defend sanctuary policies for undocumented immigrants against attempts to deport them.

Known officially as the California Values Act, the law prohibits nearly all communication between local law enforcement officials and federal immigration agents.

Pastor points out that between 1970 and 1990, the share of California’s population that was foreign-born rose from nine per cent to 22 per cent, most of the increase coming from Asia and Latin America. 

Hispanics now account for about 40 per cent of the population, outnumbering Anglos.

This was distinctly different from the rest of the country, where the foreign-born share rose in the same period from around four per cent to just over six per cent.

By contrast, the last Democratic president who carried Texas was Jimmy Carter in 1976; four years later, Ronald Reagan won Texas it has been in the Republican column ever since.

Trump beat Clinton by 52.2 per cent to 43.2 per cent in 2016, to win its 38 Electoral College votes, the second-largest number.

No Democrat has won the governorship in Texas since Ann Richards in 1990 or any statewide office since 1994.

Economically, Texas presents itself as California’s extreme opposite. Greg Abbott, the Republican governor, warns against the “California-ization” of the state, through such things as plastic bag bans and burdensome tree ordinances, which in his view pose a threat to liberty. 

Texas is growing at twice the rate of California. (In Texas, too, Hispanics account for 40 per cent of the population.) Politically, this translates into more congressional seats and electoral votes.

It is expected to receive four new congressional districts after the 2020 census. That would bring the number of electoral votes to 43. California has 12 more, but that number hasn’t increased since 2003.

If the United States were ever to devolve into a civil war, these two states probably would be, as in 1861, on different sides.

Russia is a Buffer between Israel and Iran

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Iran and Russia have been uneasy allies in the Syrian Civil War, providing aid to the Assad regime in its attempt to regain control of the country from jihadist rebels.

Russia is also attempting to serve as a buffer between the Iranians and Israelis, who are seemingly on the brink of war inside Syria – no easy task.

For now, both Iran and Israel need Russia as a shield between one another. Moscow is trying to convince the two enemies to preserve a status quo of moderation: Iran has to restrain the Shi’ite militia Hezbollah’s provocative actions, and Israel needs to restrain its assertive responses and pre-emptive air raids.

Russia is concerned with the state of relations between Israel and Iran, “in light of mutual threats and rejection by both countries,” Russia’s outgoing ambassador to Israel, Alexander Shein, has stated.

Russia is preoccupied with finding a comprehensive formula to keep the parties from feeling endangered. But this is a tricky tightrope to walk.

As Irina Zvyagelskaya, member of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, put it, “The situation for Russia is difficult as our country has good relations with Iran and Israel, which share deep differences.”

The secretary of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, met separately on April 24 with his Israeli and Iranian counterparts, Eytan Ben-David and Ali Shamkhani.

The meetings were held in the Russian resort town of Sochi, and Patrushev discussed Middle East developments with the two officials. He visited Israel this past January, and reported he had tried to prevent harm from coming to Iranian installations in Syria. 

“What is important to understand is that the Russians are very pragmatic players,” Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman said recently at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “At the end of the day, they are reasonable guys.”

There is even a “hotline” between the Russian Khmeimim air base in Syria and the Israeli Kirya command center in Tel Aviv.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on May 9 met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Netanyahu claimed that he was able to persuade Putin to delay the sale of advanced weapons, including S-300 missiles, to Syria. It was Netanyahu’s eighth visit to Moscow in three years. Next to the United States, Russia is the country to which he travels most frequently.

Israeli warplanes struck Iranian targets inside Syria the very next day, suggesting that Netanyahu may have given Putin advance notice of the attack.

“We have repeatedly noted the need for both sides to avoid any actions that would provoke the other,” said Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on May 10. “Iran and Israel assure us that they have no such intentions, but, as you know, incidents, nevertheless, happen.”
 

Also on May 10, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov met with Iran’s deputy foreign minister for political affairs, Abbas Araghchi, in Tehran.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has praised Russia’s dealings with Israel: “I believe Israeli aggression has been resisted and will be resisted, and I think it will be best for everybody to advise them to stop aggression against others.” 

While Israel and Iran would each like to lure Moscow to their own camp, they are also discovering that Russia’s role as the only entity that can deal with matters of life and death between them might just prove beneficial for them all. A “go-between” serves everyone’s interests in this volatile situation

Crimea’s Return to Russian Mainland

Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

The Crimean Peninsula has been part of Russia for centuries, settled mainly by ethnic Russians after its capture by the Tsarist Empire from Ottoman Turkish forces in 1774.

For that reason, even when the Soviet Union was formed as a nominal federation, the Crimean Peninsula was included in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, rather than in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic next door.

Yet in February 1954, perhaps for reasons of territorial proximity, then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev handed it to Ukraine. Perhaps Khrushchev also saw it as a way of fortifying and perpetuating Soviet control over its second most populous republic.

In the 1950s, the population of Crimea, then approximately 1.1 million, was roughly 75 per cent ethnic Russian and 25 per cent Ukrainian. 

Cultural ties were much stronger overall with Russia than with Ukraine, and Crimea was the site of major military and naval bases.

And even though Crimea is contiguous with southern Ukraine via the Isthmus of Perekop, the large eastern Kerch region of Crimea is very close to Russia across the Sea of Azov. 

So the transfer made little sense. But back then, internal borders within a Communist state like the USSR didn’t much matter. Now they do – because when the USSR was dissolved in 1991, Crimea remained Ukrainian.

This remained the case until President Vladimir Putin reunited the peninsula with the Russian Federation in February 2014, after claiming that its ethnic Russians were threatened by the country’s pro-Western revolution. 

However, it remained an enclave separated from Russia proper by Ukraine or water. That too has now changed.

On May 15, Putin opened a 19-kilometre four-lane bridge directly linking Russia to Crimea across the Kerch Strait that connects the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, and separates the Kerch Peninsula of Crimea in the west from the Taman Peninsula of Russia’s Krasnodar Krai (territory) in the east. 

The bridge, which will carry both road and rail traffic, is the longest in the country and one of the largest in Europe. It was built at a cost of $4 billion. 

About 40,000 passenger cars a day will be able to cross the bridge, drastically reducing the time it takes Russians to reach Crimea, which until now was accessible from Russia only by plane or ferry. It also lifted the sense of isolation Crimeans have felt since Ukraine cut off railroad links and made the border crossing difficult.

Putin called the construction “a remarkable result that makes Crimea and legendary Sevastopol even stronger and all of us closer to each other.”

Not surprisingly, Ukraine declared the bridge “illegal,” while the European Union maintained that it “constitutes another violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity by Russia.” 

However, to steal a phrase from the Palestinians, Putin has exercised Russia’s “right of return.” Despite Ukraine’s protests, it is now hard to imagine Russia’s push into Crimea being reversed.

Germany's Imported Anti-Semitism

By Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press

On December 5, 2016, I published an article, “The ‘No-Go’ Bastions inside European Cities,” in the Journal Pioneer, a Prince Edward Island newspaper, describing the ever increasing number of so-called “no-go” areas in European cities. 

These are neighbourhoods with largely Muslim refugee populations, places where even the police fear to enter.

Not surprisingly, I was lambasted by local politically correct people who refuse to accept the truth.

One notorious Israel-basher who never fails to attack the country called my piece “dangerous, disappointing and misleading,” and maintained that it “suffers from stereotypical biases and other inaccuracies.”

Another writer seemed to think that I considered all European Muslims responsible for the acts of a few who engage in violence. Of course not. Clearly, the vast majority are law-abiding people who want to get on with their lives.

But when comes to no-go areas, it looks like I was right, because now even Angela Merkel, the German chancellor who has admitted more than a million asylum seekers to the country since 2015 has acknowledged their existence. 

Merkel waited until this February to publicly refer to “no-go areas,” high-crime, largely Muslim immigrant neighborhoods across Europe where state authorities fear to tread, and the very existence of which have long been furiously denied by liberals as an Islamophobic invention. 

“There are such areas and one has to call them by their name and do something about them,” Merkel said.

She also denounced “another form of anti-Semitism” emerging in Germany. “We have a new phenomenon, as we have many refugees among whom there are, for examples, people of Arab origin, who bring another form of anti-Semitism into the country.” Her comments were broadcast by Israel TV's Channel 10 on April 22.

Merkel also made a statement on January 27, Holocaust Memorial Day in Germany. “It is inconceivable and shameful that no Jewish institution can exist without police protection, whether it is a school, a kindergarten or a synagogue,” she remarked.

In fact Germany has become a very dangerous place for Jews. Over the past year, the country has witnessed an increase of anti-Semitic attacks. In April, video of a Syrian refugee attacking a man wearing a kippa, or Jewish skullcap, while calling him a Jew in Arabic, prompted outrage in Berlin. 

Merkel condemned it as a “disgrace,” while thousands of Germans of different faith groups, including Muslims, marched in solidarity with the Jewish community across the country.

Since then, other disturbing stories have emerged in the German news media: an Afghan boy greeting his teacher with “Heil Hitler” and proclaiming that he, too, was Aryan, and a group of Syrian refugees calling the Holocaust “a Jewish conspiracy,” explaining that they had learned that in school back home.

Josef Schuster, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, stated that the incidents “are more aggressive, more pronounced, and directly affect Jewish people with insults or attacks.” 

Many of those who arrived in Germany came from nations where anti-Semitism is widespread, including Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. But officials, analysts and Jewish and Muslim leaders say Germany has been slow to recognize the risks.

Christian Democratic legislator Stephan Harbarth told Die Welt that the government must be able to wield the ultimate threat of deportation. “Anyone who incites anti-Semitic hate and rejects Jewish life in Germany cannot stay in our country,” Harbarth contended. 

Sawsan Chebli, state secretary for federal affairs for the city of Berlin, a Muslim of Palestinian background, has suggested that young migrants who have chanted anti-Israel slogans in demonstrations in Germany should be required to visit a concentration camp memorial.

It was the sight of Arab immigrants, including Palestinian-Germans like herself, burning an Israeli flag underneath the Brandenburg Gate in December while chanting “Death to Israel” that moved Chebli to speak up.

The German government has now appointed a commissioner for anti-Semitism. Felix Klein is the first person to hold the job, which was created by Germany’s Bundestag this year.

“We’ve seen anti-Semitic cases recently all over Germany,” he told the Washington Post’s Berlin bureau chief, Griff Witte, in an April 25 interview. 

He pointed to “the great influx of refugees and people who came to Germany that were raised and educated in countries that are still in the state of war with Israel, or that have been brought up with certain perceptions of Jews in Israel that are totally unacceptable to a German society.”

Klein stated that “to a certain extent, the cultural dimension that is linked with the influx was underestimated. Now we have to deal with it.”

It’s beyond ironic that the country responsible for the Holocaust has now, in a manner of speaking, “imported” new forms of anti-Semitism while it was trying to alleviate the plight of refugees fleeing civil war in Syria and elsewhere. It’s certainly a demonstration of the law of unintended consequences.

South Africa's Tragic Political Past

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

 

Seventy years ago an election took place that ushered in the darkest period of South Africa’s history. 

On May 26, 1948 the United Party, which had led the government since 1933, was defeated by the Reunited National Party (Herenigde Nasionale Party in Afrikaans). 

Prime Minister Jan Smuts, the noted British Commonwealth statesman, lost power to Daniel François Malan, a Dutch Reformed Church cleric.

Government would now be completely dominated by the insular Afrikaner nationalists, the descendants of the “Boers” who had been defeated by Britain in the bitter South African Boer War of 1899-1902. 

Their surrender had forced them to dismantle their two independent entities, the Orange Free State and the South African (Transvaal) Republic, in the interior of the land. These were forcibly merged with the British Cape and Natal colonies along the coast into the Union of South Africa in 1910. 

But British atrocities during the war had created a strong sense of Afrikaner nationalism.

Malan and his National Party had opposed South Africa’s participation in the Second World War as much of the Afrikaner population continued to harbor anti-British feelings, and some were attracted to Nazi German ideology.

As a student at Stellenbosch University Malan had embraced Social Darwinism as a logical development of the theory of evolution.

Founded in 1918, the Afrikaner Broederbond had played a seminal role in disseminating Afrikaner nationalism. It was dedicated to the promotion of Afrikaner values, cultural identity and political supremacy, and promoted Afrikaans as a distinct language, rather than a Dutch dialect.

The victorious National Party, many of them Broederbond members, now began to institute the country’s officially sanctioned system of white supremacy known as apartheid (“separateness” in Afrikaans). 

It was not entirely dismantled until 1994, when a new South Africa, with universal suffrage and majority rule, emerged under Nelson Mandela.

Apartheid’s foundations were firmly laid during Malan’s six-and-a-half years as prime minister. His objective was to secure white (particularly Afrikaner) rule for all time. The basic components of his strategy were the full separation of the racial groups in South Africa.

These included the establishment of separate residential and business sections in urban areas for each race, the ban on sexual relations between the races, the establishment of separate educational standards that disadvantaged Black Africans,  and the disenfranchisement of “Coloured” (mixed race) people.

The system was later expanded under the concept known as separate development. The Bantustans, or homelands, were areas to which the majority of the Black population would be moved to prevent them from living in the urban areas of South Africa. 

The white minority regime argued that the Bantustans were the “original homes” of the black peoples of South Africa.

The Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970 declared that Blacks living throughout South Africa would henceforth be legal citizens in the homeland designated for their particular ethnic group. These were to be treated as separate nations. It cancelled their South African citizenship.

In reality the National government aimed to move every Black person to their respective ethnic “homeland” in order to leave South Africa completely in the hands of the White population. 

It has been estimated that 3.5 million people were forced from their homes from the 1960s through the 1980s, many being resettled in the Bantustans.

In total, ten homelands designed for specific ethnic groups were created. The two homelands of Ciskei and Transkei were established for the Xhosa people, while Bophuthatswana was founded for the Tswana people.

KwaZulu was intended for the Zulu people, Lebowa for the Pedi and Northern Ndebele, KwaNdebele for the Ndebele,Venda for Vendas, Gazankulu was for Shangaan and Tsonga people, KaNgwane for the Swazi, while Qwa Qwa was for Basothos.

The South African government declared four of the Bantustans “independent.” Transkei in 1976, Bophuthatswana in 1977, Venda in 1979, and Ciskei in 1981 became supposedly “sovereign,” though no other countries recognized them as such. The remaining Bantustans remained self-governing.

There were ten others in Southwest Africa (now Namibia) then controlled by South Africa. They were abolished in May 1989.

After a long and sometimes violent struggle by the African National Congress (ANC) and other anti-apartheid activists both inside and outside the country, the repeal of discriminatory laws began in 1990.

The South African Bantustans ceased to exist in April 1994, and were re-incorporated into the new provinces of a democratic South Africa.

Lebanon's Election Provides Little Cause for Hope

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

 

On May 6, Lebanon held its first parliamentary elections in nearly a decade. They were held under a new electoral law with a proportional representation component. Previously, all seats were allocated under the first past the post method.

Lebanon’s 128-seat parliament allocates 64 seats each to the country’s Christian and Muslim faiths. They are then further subdivided between all of Lebanon’s 18 officially recognised religious sects.

Lebanese leaders saw the new system as a way to enable independent and civil society groups to compete against established, largely sectarian-based parties and political bosses. 

The election marked the entrance of civil society groups into the electoral sphere, with independent candidates running as part of a campaign known as We Are All the Nation. 

By 2018, the wave of electoral activism had led to the creation of a coalition of 11 civil society groups challenging establishment parties in 9 of Lebanon’s 15 districts. 

It didn’t work out that way. The strong hold sectarianism has among Lebanese saw traditional parties win out against civil society challengers. In this election, they took only one seat.

The big winners were the two main Shia Muslims parties. Hezbollah and its Shia Muslim partner Amal won 28 seats between them (17 for Anal, 14 for Hezbollah) ; another 13 seats were won by other political parties and deputies aligned with them. This makes a total of 44 out of 128 seats in parliament.

By renewing their alliance with President Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), a Maronite Christian party which took 25 seats, the two Shia groups will control enough seats needed to block the most important actions of parliament, for which a two-thirds quorum of members is required.

It is the first such alliance between major Maronite Christian and Shia Muslim political parties in Lebanon’s history.

However, the FPM lost a few seats to Samir Geagea’s Lebanese Forces (LF), a more militant Christian grouping, which doubled its number of seats to 14. Still, the FPM remains the largest Christian presence in parliament.

Lebanon’s sectarian political structure is often exploited by outside powers, including Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Hezbollah has sent thousands of its fighters to Syria to support forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad in the civil war.

So not surprisingly, pro-Syrian politicians made their strongest electoral comeback since Damascus ended a nearly three-decade military presence in Lebanon in 2005. Syrian allies elected included former security chief Jamil Sayyed, former deputy parliament speaker Elie Firzly and former defence minister Abdul-Rahim Murad.

Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah called the results a “great political and moral victory for the resistance option that protects the sovereignty of the country.” It was “mission accomplished.”  

Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s Future Movement (FM) won 19 seats in the voting, and though this was a major decline, he will still have the largest Sunni Muslim bloc in parliament.

Harari may have suffered from his abortive decision to resign as prime minister while visiting Saudi Arabia last November. He eventually returned to Beirut and rescinded his resignation, but it looked as if the Saudis, evidently concerned by the influence of Hezbollah in Lebanese politics, were behind it.

His own father Rafik, who was also a prime minister, was assassinated in 2005; Hezbollah has been blamed for the murder.

Now, waning support from Saudi Arabia undermined the party’s electoral machine and ability to dole out patronage. The FM lost to Hezbollah and Amal-backed Sunni candidates even in Hariri’s strongholds of Beirut, Saida and Tripoli. 

“We had hoped for a better result, it’s true,” stated Hariri. “And we were hoping for a wider bloc, with a higher Shia and Christian representation, that’s also true.” 

In contrast, Shia parties focus their patronage more narrowly but establish stronger bonds by doling out big-ticket items such as jobs and loans.

Mapping a Potential Kurdish State

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

Since the Middle East’s more than 30 million Kurds, spread across at least five countries, have never formed a state of their own, no one knows what the boundaries of a sovereign Kurdistan might be.

Cartographic knowledge and power are intertwined. Throughout history, maps have been powerful political instruments used to depict claims over territories, boundaries, citizens and human resources. 

Kurdish ones are no exception, as Kurdish nationalists continue to cartographically construct Kurdistan.

After the First World War and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the victorious Western allies made provision for a Kurdish state in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres. 

Such hopes were dashed three years later, however, when the Treaty of Lausanne, which set the boundaries of modern Turkey, made no provision for a Kurdistan and left Kurds with minority status in various new countries. 

Kurdish interests were swept aside in favour of other nationalisms that labeled them “Mountain Turks,” “Kurdish Arabs,” and so on, in the new states set up after 1918. Many were told that speaking Kurdish was now akin to treason. 

Turkish Kurds, who comprise at least 20 per cent of the population of the country, have ever since been oppressed by government policies that did not allow them to express themselves.  

Turkey crushed Kurdish revolts in 1925, 1930 and 1938. A Kurdish separatist group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) was formed by Abdullah Ocalan and has been involved in armed conflict against the Turkish state since 1984. 

Since then, more than 40,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced.

Iraq put down Kurdish uprisings in the 1960s and 1970s. Between 1986 and 1989, the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein conducted a fierce campaign against the Kurds which climaxed with a chemical weapons attack on the town on Halabja. 

The closest they’ve come to having a state is their de facto self-governing entity in northern Iraq, which they managed to create after the downfall of Saddam in 2003. It sovereignty is not acknowledged by any of its neighbours.

Maps as well as guns are among the weapons used by Kurdish irredentists. They claim a Greater Kurdistan region that extends from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, absorbing within it considerable portions of the countries that have denied the existence of a Kurdish state.

These maps have acquired a power of their own and reflect the political ambition of Kurdish nationalists.

Yet while the Kurds have long talked of reuniting their people in a greater Kurdistan, today their population still remains carved up among many states, themselves unwilling to cede any of their territory.

No one knows what shape the Middle East will take once the dust of the current conflicts settles.

Will it include an emergent Kurdistan, perhaps born out of the current Kurdish jurisdiction in northern Iraq? Will there emerge one united Kurdistan or many? It’s impossible to guess.

China’s Uyghur Issue Won’t Go Away

By Henry Srebrnik [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

In April of 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for a “people’s war” to make “terrorists” feel “like rats scurrying across the street.”

To whom was he referring? Nationalists among the country’s Uyghur minority who are fighting for a greater measure of freedom.

So it’s no surprise to learn that the Beijing regime has ramped up its repression of the Uyghurs, who number some 11.3 million people, living mostly in far western Xinjiang.

In December 2015, China’s National People’s Congress passed the country’s first counterterrorism legislation. 

The law carried sweeping provisions, enabling China’s various counter-terrorism organs to identify and suppress individuals or groups deemed to be “terrorists.” It allowed the army to undertake counter-terrorism operations abroad.

A Turkic Muslim ethnic group, the Uyghurs have never reconciled themselves to Han Chinese overlordship.

What Beijing refers to as the “East Turkestan terrorist” threat to China was framed and understood by Beijing in primarily nationalist terms.

But after 2001, they began to label Uyghur opposition as “religious extremism” linked to transnational jihadist organizations.

 

The discovery of Uyghurs at guerrilla camps in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion of 2001 highlighted the fact that some had been lured by a more fundamentalist form of Islam.

China’s publication of its first official account of Uyghur “terrorism” in Xinjiang in January 2002. It claimed that “East Turkistan terrorist forces” had been responsible for over 200 “terrorist incidents” between 1990 and 2001 that claimed the lives of 162 people and injured 440.

Since 9/11, China has consistently blamed two Uyghur militant groups, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) and the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP), for major terrorist attacks. ETIM was singled out as being “supported and directed” by Osama bin Laden. 

ETIM functioned in Afghanistan from 1998 on and established links to al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) during that time. It ceased to exist after the death of its leader, Hasan Mahsum, during a Pakistani military operation in Waziristan in October 2003.

TIP, based in the tribal areas along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, emerged as a successor organization to ETIM in 2007.

Protests began in March 2008 in the region’s main city, Urumqi, and Hotan, and spread to Kashgar and elsewhere through the summer, coinciding with the Olympic Games in Beijing. There were reports of bus bombings and attacks on police stations. 

In July 2009 bloody clashes between Uyghurs and Han Chinese in Urumqi prompted the Chinese government to send large numbers of troops to patrol the streets. 

In April 2013 there was a sudden upsurge in violence, when the authorities accused separatist “terrorists” of attacks in Kashgar that left 21 dead. There was further violence in the summer and in 2014. 

China has deployed the issue of Uyghur terrorism to legitimate, both domestically and internationally, the implementation of repression of Uyghur opposition in Xinjiang. 

The broad definition of extremism and separatism has resulted in the disappearance, jailing, execution, or forced attendance at re-education classes, of tens of thousands of Uyghurs charged with endangering state security.

Beginning in the early 1990s, Beijing made the issue of Uyghur “separatism” or “splittism” a key concern in its bilateral and multilateral diplomacy with the new states of Central Asia. 

The linkages between ETIM and TIP with jihadist groups in Afghanistan and Syria played a central role in cementing Beijing’s agenda within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, comprised of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

In practice, this has amounted to the organization’s almost exclusive focus on regular joint military and counter-terrorism exercises, judicial cooperation on the extradition of suspected “terrorists”, and information sharing. 

So China’s approach to the Xinjiang and Uyghur issue has played an important role in undergirding domestic stability and shaping its relations with Central Asia.  

About 50,000 Uyghurs live in Turkey. Most migrated there after Xinjiang’s absorption into Communist China in 1949.

Turkey has expressed a strong concern for the fate of the Turkic Uyghurs, stemming from its ethnic and cultural affinities with the Uyghurs and a perception of them as an “authentic” Turkic people suffering under Chinese rule. 

The East Turkestan Liberation Organization, allied with ETIM, was established in Turkey in the late 1990s.

In July 2015 anti-Chinese sentiment led to protests across Turkey, with Chinese flags burnt and Chinese restaurants attacked.

Israel Celebrates Historic 70th Anniversary

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Seventy years ago, on May 14, 1948, the State of Israel came into being. It was born just three years after the greatest Jewish tragedy, the Holocaust, had ended.

It was a near-run thing: In November 1947, one day prior to the expected United Nations vote on partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, the CIA urged U.S. President Harry Truman not to throw his weight behind the idea. It didn’t think this state could survive.

Yet Israel has become a modern, prosperous nation. It has a standard of living that rivals Western Europe, though it lacks significant natural resources. It can boast of scientific achievements and military and technological clout beyond its modest size.

It counts eight living Nobel winners among its citizens and has helped give the world instant messaging, Intel chips and smart, autonomous vehicles.

Economic indicators for Israel showed another successful year in 2017 as, for the first time ever, Israel’s GDP per capita has surpassed that of major industrialized countries such as Great Britain, Japan and France.

Despite facing more challenges than virtually any other country, Israel has transformed from a poor and fragile backwater to a nation of cutting-edge technologies and knowledge during seven brief decades, while fighting for its existence.

It has become a powerhouse which has seen economic growth for 15 consecutive years. Its labour market is close to full employment and the unemployment level is the lowest it has been in decades.

“We can stop and look back with satisfaction” at the “amazing achievements made by the Israeli economy in the 70 years of the State’s existence,” Bank of Israel Governor Karnit Flug said at a press conference in Jerusalem in March. 

The skyline of Tel Aviv, its largest city, is changed beyond recognition. In the 1960s and 1970s, everyone in Tel Aviv knew exactly where the Shalom Meir Tower was located. It was the only skyscraper in town, or even in Israel. The 31-floor building served as an urban monument in the cognitive map of the city’s residents.

In the past decade this entire area in central Israel has become a real skyscraper hub. More generally, close to 800 buildings across Israel contain 20 floors or more.

In 1948, there were some 650,000 Jews in Israel, who represented about five per cent of the world’s Jews. Today, 43 per cent of the world’s Jews live in Israel; this is now the world’s largest Jewish community. Israel is about to become home to roughly two-thirds of all Jewish children in the world.

The country managed to receive huge waves of immigrants, and this population surge has contributed to a mix of cultures which, many believe, created a fertile ground for innovation.

“Our ability to absorb immigrants and integrate them is something not many other countries have done,” said Yaniv Pagot, head of strategy for the Ayalon Group, an investment firm. “This is an achievement that has huge economic implications and also long term social impact.”

Efraim Karsh, the director of the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, remarked that “Israel is a melting pot” and on the whole a success story.

Persecution in Europe had sent European Jews pouring into the country. They were later joined by immigrants from countries like Morocco, Yemen, Iraq and Iran. 

Later arrivals from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia have made Israel even more diverse. All of these people have been forged into a Hebrew-speaking population.

“And I think in a way it’s remarkable, because you don’t have many societies, Western or otherwise, absorbing huge populations several times their size and doing it in such a successful way,” he added.

Israeli Jews are a diverse lot, in outlook, style of life, and even attire. But on the shared sense of an Israeli nation they are far more homogeneous than might outwardly appear.

Not bad for a country under continuous siege.

Hezbollah in Driver's Seat in Lebanon

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

The Lebanese parliamentary election held May 6 produced, as always, a confusing array of winners and losers. But one thing is crystal clear: the militant Shia Muslim group Hezbollah is in the driver’s seat.

Lebanon’s 128-seat parliament allocates 64 seats each to the country’s Christian and Muslim faiths. They are then further subdivided between all of Lebanon’s 18 officially recognised religious sects.

This leads to confusing and oftentimes shifting coalition building among various parties across the sectarian divides.

Lebanon should have held elections in 2013, but deputies extended their terms three times because parties could not agree on a new electoral law.

The national turnout, at 49 per cent, was down compared to 54 per cent in 2009. In Beirut precincts, the turnout was just between 32 and 42 per cent. 

Some of this was attributed to confusion over the new electoral rules, which redrew constituency boundaries and changed the system from “first past the post” to proportional representation.

Altogether, 17 parties won seats, and a further 16 independents were also elected.

But the main race was between Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s Western and Saudi-supported Future Movement-led coalition and Hassan Nasrallah’s Hezbollah and its allies, backed by Iran.

In effect, the election was part of the region-wide power struggle that is tearing apart the Middle East.

Hezbollah and its Shia Muslim partner Amal won 28 seats between them; at least another 16 seats were won by other political parties aligned with them. 

By renewing their alliance with President Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), a Maronite Christian party which took 16 seats, the two Shia groups will control enough seats needed to block the most important actions of parliament, for which a two-thirds quorum of members is required.

However, the FPM lost a few seats to Samir Geagea’s Lebanese Forces (LF), a more militant Christian grouping, which nearly doubled its number of seats to 13. Still, the FPM remains the largest Christian presence in parliament.

The Syrian civil war has divided Lebanon, pitting parties supporting Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad against Saudi-aligned parties opposed to it.

Hariri’s Future Movement (FM) won 20 seats in the voting, and though this was a major decline from the 33 they previously held, he will still have the largest Sunni Muslim bloc in parliament.

But the election results show that Sunni voters are losing faith in Hariri’s party amid a stagnant economy and general exasperation over the war in Syria that has brought one million refugees to Lebanon.

The FM lost to Hezbollah and Amal-backed Sunni candidates even in Hariri’s strongholds of Beirut, Saida and Tripoli. 

Nasrallah called the results a “great political and moral victory for the resistance option that protects the sovereignty of the country.” 

Hezbollah has been a member of Lebanon’s coalition government since 2016 and will clearly continue to remain in it, regardless of who becomes prime minister.

Jews and Koreans: An Increasingly Close Relationship

By Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press

For the past few years, I have been part of a team that is teaching an Asian Studies course at the University of Prince Edward Island.

One of the professors, who is Korean-born, has been working diligently at raising the profile of Asian Studies and, specifically, creating courses in Korean Studies.

It got me to thinking about the relationship between Jews and Koreans.

While Communist North Korea is no friend of Israel’s, South Korea, which in 2012 celebrated the 50th anniversary of its diplomatic relations with Israel, is eager to intensify that relationship, particularly with regard to issues of security and peace – after all, both countries are threatened by missiles from across borders.

They also are working together in the spheres of renewable energy, science and technology, and bilateral trade.

North Korea has no identifiable Jews. South Korea is a country with a deep Buddhist history, but one which has embraced with vigour the Christianity brought to its shores by missionaries in the late 1800s. Official statistics say some 30 per cent of South Koreans are church-going. 

Jews are few and far between. They number some 500-600 people in a population of 50 million. But many South Koreans are philo-Semitic, and value the cultural traits in Judaism. In August 2005, the Jerusalem Summit promoting Christian support for Israel was held in Seoul.

Many South Koreans praise Jews as a high achieving and accomplished group, sometimes citing the disproportionate of successful Jewish businesspeople and Nobel Prize winners as evidence. In fact, Korean translations of the Talmud (the book of Jewish commentary on the Bible) are very popular in the country.

Of course on the level of personal relations, since most Jews historically lived in Europe and the Middle East, while Koreans inhabited the distant Korean peninsula at the far eastern edge of Asia, they had virtually no contact with other.

However, in Canada and the United States, this is no longer the case, as immigration has led to demographic proximity.  

Both groups tend to live in big cities and share common values such as hard work, close family ties and a reverence for education – some sociologists have referred to each of them as “model minorities.” 

For Jews, this emphasis has its roots in the Talmudic academies and the Talmud-Torahs birthed in the east European village. For Asians the origins lie in the Confucian societal system, under which civil officers were appointed only after passing difficult examinations requiring years of study. Not surprisingly, their children today meet each other in colleges and universities. 

As a consequence, anecdotal evidence points to increasing rates of intermarriage between Koreans and Jews in North America, and this is backed up by survey research. 

The book JewAsian: Race, Religion, and Identity for America’s Newest Jews, published two years ago, written by Helen Kiyong Kim and Noah Samuel Leavitt, sociologists at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington State, is the first book-length study of these couples and their children.

The Jewish-American Leavitt and the Korean-American Kim met at a dinner party in the late 1990s, when they were both graduate students at the University of Chicago, and later wed. 

They started to notice that not a week went by without at least one Asian-Jewish couple appearing in the New York Times wedding announcements section.

When in May 2012, Facebook’s Jewish founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg married Chinese- American physician Priscilla Chan, Asian-Jewish marriages had become so common that many pundits found no reason to even mention the inter-ethnic aspect of the union.

A 2014 article by E. Tammy Kim, a writer on the editorial staff of the New Yorker magazine, observed that “New York City’s least remarkable interracial couple is the Asian American woman/Jewish man. In middle-class, over-educated enclaves of Manhattan and Brooklyn, it’s an inescapable pair.”

My own nephew, in Toronto, is married to a Korean-Canadian woman, whose parents came to Canada from South Korea. They are devout Presbyterians – some 80 per cent of Koreans in North America are members of various Christian churches.  (Our parents emigrated from Poland.)

He and his future wife met as students at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine and had two wedding ceremonies, one Korean Presbyterian and one Jewish, three years ago. They couldn’t be happier, and so are their parents.

Is Europe Coming Undone?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

 

Until recently, liberal democracy reigned triumphant. For all its shortcomings, most citizens seemed deeply committed to their form of government.

But now, norms and institutions are faltering and authoritarian populists are on the rise, as many people have become fed up with liberal democracy itself.

Ever since the 2016 Brexit vote in Britain to leave the European Union, European elites have been in a panic. They fear that the once seemingly-inevitable unification of the continent is coming undone. 

Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian, in his 2017 book After Europe, gets to the heart of the matter.  The chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Krastev speaks of “the inability and unwillingness of liberal elites to discuss migration and contend with its consequences.”

No right-wing ideologue, Krastev warns that the risk of disintegration should force us to recognize that the refugee crisis has dramatically changed the nature of democratic politics.

What we are witnessing in Europe is not simply a populist riot against the establishment but a voters’ rebellion against the meritocratic elites. The bureaucrats in Brussels are out of touch with the societies they are supposed to serve.

“Fear of Islamic terrorism and a general anxiety over the unfamiliar are at the core of Europe’s moral panic,” he warns. 

This is even manifesting itself in Germany, where only a few years ago Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed more than a million migrants. After last year’s German election, she is barely hanging on, leading a governing “grand coalition” with the Social Democrats. 

At the government’s official inauguration, Merkel entered her fourth term as chancellor with only nine more votes than the required minimum. Names for possible replacements are already being bandied about within her Christian Democratic Union (CDU). And remember, Germany is the lynchpin of the EU.

Founded in March 2017, the Werteunion, or Union of Values, recently met in Schwetzingen to adopt what its members called the “conservative manifesto.” Their mission: taking back the CDU from Merkel and redirecting it to its conservative roots.

Alexander Mitsch, one of the Werteunion’s founders, told the New York Times he felt that the state was failing, and that he needed to act.

He feels that European culture needs to be defended and demands a full stop of immigration until the country can process the pile of open asylum cases. Such people see the issue as an existential threat to Germany’s national identity.

Aother group of conservative intellectuals have published a declaration of solidarity, expressing concern over “Germany being damaged by illegal mass immigration.” It now has more than 100,000 signatories.

Alexander Dobrindt, who heads the parliamentary caucus of the Bavarian-based Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party of Merkel’s Christian Democrats, thinks such sentiments are underrepresented in public debate. It is time, he maintains, for a “conservative revolution.”

Taking advantage of this popular mood is the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the far-right party that entered parliament for the first time in the elections last September. They see Merkel’s grand coalition with the Social Democrats as an opening for them to continue to grow.

In recent months, the AfD has introduced legislation to make German the country’s “national language” and to alter the laws governing dual citizenship.

Now that these and other anti-immigrant views are being expressed by a parliamentary party, not individuals, members of government cannot criticize them as racist because, by law, ministers are required to be neutral in their treatment of political parties.

In any case, on the issue of immigration, however, the centrist parties have themselves shifted their tone.

The 2013 coalition agreement had talked about Germany as a “cosmopolitan country” that saw “immigration as an opportunity.” 

The picture presented in the most recent agreement is much darker: “We’re continuing our efforts to mitigate migration to Germany and Europe appropriate with regard to the ability of society to integrate, so that a situation like 2015 is not repeated,” it stated.

In mid-March, CSU chair Horst Seehofer, the new minister of the Interior, Development and Heimat, declared that “Islam does not belong to Germany.”

For the first time, a cap has been set for the number of asylum-seekers who can come to Germany: 180,000-200,000 a year.

In December 2017 in nearby Austria, a government that includes the Freedom Party of Austria (FPO), one that advocates anti-immigration policies, took power. Merkel has to be worried.

Poland Kept Fighting After the 1939 Invasion

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI Guardian

 

May 8 marks the 73th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe.

In North America, too little is known about the tragic fate of Poland, caught between a Nazi Germany and a Communist Soviet Union.

When Poland was conquered and partitioned by Germany and the USSR in September 1939, much of the Polish Army was evacuated to France and then Great Britain, where it was reconstituted as the Polish Armed Forces in the West, under the command of General Wladyslaw Sikorski.

Under the guidance of the Polish government-in-exile, based in London, Poles provided significant contributions to the Allied effort throughout the war, fighting on land, sea, and air. 

A total of 145 Polish fighter pilots served in the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain in 1940, making up the largest non-British contribution. Poles who flew with British squadrons shot down 203 German planes and damaged a further 36. 

This was over 11 per cent of all the planes shot down in the Battle of Britain, and at that time the Poles made up the largest contingent of foreign pilots flying with the Royal Air Force. By the end of the war, around 19,400 Poles were serving in the Polish Air Force in Great Britain and in the RAF.

At their height, the manpower of the Polish Armed Forces under British command reached 249,000. This made them the fourth largest after the Soviet, United States and British armed forces. Of these Polish units, almost 27,000 were killed or went missing in action.

In 1940 a Polish brigade took part in the Battle of Narvik, in Norway, and two Polish divisions took part in the campaign against the Germans in France.

Later in the war in the west, Polish ground troops were present in the North Africa campaign, at the siege of Tobruk; the Italian campaign, including the bloody Battle of Monte Cassino; the 1944 liberation of France, at the battle of the Falaise pocket; and they provided one division in the Allied invasion of Germany.

In the east, Polish troops that had surrendered to the Soviets in 1939 were placed in prisoners of war camps while Russia and Germany remained de facto allies under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. 

But with the Nazi invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941, tens of thousands of Polish citizens held in Soviet forced labour camps were released. They were recruited into a new Polish army under General Wladyslaw Anders. 

For the next three years the Anders Army would travel from central Asia, through the Middle East, and North Africa, to eventually confront the Germans in Italy in one of the most crucial battles of the war. 

A Polish Carpathian brigade had already been formed in Syria, then under French rule, to which many Polish troops had escaped after 1939 via Romania. It became part of the Anders Army, when the renamed Polish II Corps reached Palestine in 1942.

From Jan. 17 to May 19, 1944 the Corps played a crucial role in defeating the Germans in the battle of Monte Cassino. This hard-fought victory allowed the Allied forces to capture Rome and later, the whole of southern Europe. 

Another decisive battle fought by the Anders Army was the Battle of Ancona, in which Polish troops took over a strategic Adriatic port.

In occupied Poland itself, resistance was continued by the underground state, led by the Polish Home Army, by far the largest partisan force in occupied Europe. It confronted the Germans throughout the entire period of the Nazi occupation.

The Warsaw rising, which began on Aug. 1, 1944, and lasted until Oct. 2, saw more than 200,000 Polish fighters and civilians killed and about 85 per cent of the city destroyed by the Nazis. But resistance continued.

Poland never stopped fighting, from Sept. 1, 1939 right through to May 8, 1945.

Macron, Emperor of the French

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

 

French President Emmanuel Macron cuts a dashing figure on the international stage. He’s the golden boy of the liberal media.

He called for the defence of European liberal democracy, which he described as “unique in the world,” in a speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg on April 17.

He wants Europeans to create a special finance minister for the Euro-zone countries. He also wants them to set up a mechanism to support ailing national economies, and to boost European defence and security policy.

On the sensitive subject of immigration, Macron proposed setting up an EU fund to help communities that agree to welcome refugees.

Back home, though, anti-Macron sentiment is growing. For many, it has become increasingly clear that in the year since being elected president, he has developed a Napoleon complex and thinks he’s the emperor of France. 

A wave of strikes and demonstrations has crippled France, as opposition grows to Macron’s economic policies, including plans to reform public services and slash jobs. 

Railway workers are staging two-day strikes every three days, trying to force the government to give up an overhaul of the national railway company.

Some French universities have been occupied by radical leftist and anarchist students. There is rising discontent among the staffs of public hospitals and nursing homes affected by budget cuts. Angry pensioners feel unfairly targeted by taxes.

Tens of thousands of people gathered across France on May 5 to rally against Macron.  There were images of Macron as the Emperor Napoleon, Dracula and Jupiter to represent their opinion of the French president.

On the far right and left, Rassemblement National leader Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, head of La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), are accusing the government of planning the full privatisation of the railways at the behest of the European Union. 

They are playing on fears that Macron’s reforms presage the end of the French welfare system. France spends more on social security than any other EU country -- 34.3 per cent of GDP compared to the EU average of 28.7 per cent.

Macron faced a grilling over his unpopular economic reforms by two veteran journalists, Edwy Plenel of the investigative website Mediapart and Jean-Jacques Bourdin of Radio Monte Carlo, in a television interview on April 15.

“In every area, there is discontent,” Plenel told Macron, during the 2 ½ hour exchange. The president was repeatedly attacked over his pro-business economic policy which has earned him the nickname “president of the rich” among opponents.

When Macron, who was visibly angered, sought to defend his policies, he was accused of being arrogant. “You are not the teacher and we are not the students!” Plenel admonished the president. 

But that’s exactly what Macron thinks he is. And he will continue browbeating the French until they fall into line – after all, that’s what Napoleon used to do.

Nicaragua Rulers Grow Arrogant

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

 

The year 1979 was very much a zeitgeist shift in many parts of the world. We especially remember the coming to power of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. But it was also when the Sandinista rebels took power in the Central American nation of Nicaragua.

I was a journalist in Washington in the 1980s, when they were the darlings of the progressive left, who were dubbed the “sandalistas” by the press. 

The Sandinistas were enraged when U.S. President Ronald Reagan, elected in 1980, began supporting the so-called “contras” fighting Ortega’s revolutionaries.

Named for César Augusto Sandino, a hero of Nicaraguan resistance to the American military occupation of the country from 1927 to 1933, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) was founded in 1962 as a revolutionary group committed to the overthrow of the Somoza family that ruled the country. 

By the mid-1970s their attacks led dictator Anastasio Somoza to unleash bloody reprisals against them. 

But the Sandinistas gained support and, headed by the brothers Daniel and Humberto Ortega, overthrew Somoza in July 1979. 

When Reagan began to support the” contras,” Nicaragua became dependent on the support of Cuba and the Soviet Union.

By 1990, Nicaraguans, weary of war and economic depression, voted for a coalition of opposition parties, and the Sandinistas relinquished power.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. The FSLN retained a base in the country’s army and police forces.

In 2006, the FSLN regained power when Ortega was elected president. Re-elected in 2011, Ortega also won a “supermajority” in the National Assembly, allowing him to amend the constitution by removing presidential term limits, setting the stage for Ortega’s re-election in 2016.

But, as is so often the case, the revolutionaries, having tasted power, begin to abuse it. Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, who is today vice president, soon faced accusations of enriching themselves with government funds. 

Their children ran their business empire via a web of media companies that function as the government’s communications department.

The couple made institutional changes that allowed them to control the Supreme Court and the National Assembly, and were accused of electoral fraud. The Court blocked a leading opposition candidate from participating in the 2016 election.

Today, other Nicaraguans are fighting for freedom -- from Ortega and his cronies. In April several days of violence and mass unrest left some 60 people dead. 

The uprising was sparked by an overhaul of the social security system, which required workers to pay more and retirees to receive less. University students, already angry over a forest fire at a natural reserve that the government failed to extinguish, rallied against the changes.

Students took over the Polytechnic University in the capital, Managua. Radio Dario in the country’s ­second-largest city, Leon, was burned. 

Murillo issued a stream of belittling comments, calling the protesters “bloodsuckers,” “criminals,” and “vampires.” 

As word of the protests spread, Ortega’s government sought to punish the demonstrators. Police attacked crowds in the capital; they entered the Metropolitan Cathedral grounds and fired on hundreds of students huddled inside. 

Ortega was finally forced to rescind the changes to the social security system, and he agreed to negotiations with the students, but the damage was done.

Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes has now told the demonstrators that Nicaragua’s Roman Catholic Church would give Ortega one month to reach agreements that satisfy society's demands.

As is so often the case in Latin America, a revolution comes full circle: yesterday’s liberators become today’s elites, and the political cycle starts anew.