Once a Model of Liberation, Algeria is a Disappointment

By Henry Srebrni, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Before the Vietnamese struggle for unification took centre stage as its cause in the mid-1960s, the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) was the darling of the European left.

French intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir lionized its fighters, and Italian filmmakers such as Gillo Pontecorvo made movies of the fight.

Anti-colonial revolutionary nationalists were mistakenly viewed as socialists. 

Even Americans, and not only radicals, supported its battle for liberation. John F. Kennedy, then a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, in 1957 argued that excessive American support for French colonialism would only further weaken France, transform moderate Algerian nationalists into Communist rebels, thus helping the Soviets gain a foothold in the Mediterranean.

Kennedy viewed anticolonial liberation as the wave of the future and felt and the United States should not subordinate its support for that wave by supporting the colonial powers of Western Europe.

Though legally part of France, Algerian Arab and Berber Muslims outnumbered European colons (settlers) by nine million to one million when the war began in 1954.

By the time it concluded in 1962, at least 150,000 FLN guerrillas, 25,000 French troops, and hundreds of thousands of civilians – some estimates place it a 1.5 million -- had been killed.

Most of the European-descended population left for France; they remained a sullen and right-wing group, accusing French President Charles de Gaulle of betraying them.

The new Algeria was seen as a beacon of Third World liberation and a socialist model for others to emulate. Revolutionaries from the Black Panthers to the African National Congress were feted in Algiers.

Algeria never lived up to its bright promise, though. The FLN established a one-party state, stifling all opposition, and the country became just another military-backed kleptocracy, kept afloat by the sale of oil and natural gas.

A once-fervent supporter of the revolution, the French-Tunisian writer Albert Memmi noted with sadness that “After decades of independence they are still cutting throats in Algeria… and condemning the uncovered faces of women.” In his 2004 book Decolonization and the Decolonized, he asserted that “In Algeria the army has maintained a reign of terror.”

Algerian writer and journalist Kamel Daoud, who, like many Algerians lives in France, is even more critical, and has published widely on his views, including in the New York Times, something that does not endear him to his fellow Algerians.

“My concerns and commitments in Algeria today are about individual liberties, a regime incapable of change and the rise of Islamism,” he wrote in a Times opinion piece last October 15.

Today the country has a population of around 42 million, with over 3.5 million living in the capital, Algiers. Arabic is the official language, while French and Berber Tamazight are also spoken. The currency is the dinar.

The oil and gas sector is the backbone of the economy, accounting for about 20 per cent of the gross domestic product, and 85 per cent of total exports. The country’s other natural resources include iron ore, phosphates, uranium and lead.

But its long-suffering people seem to have had enough. With the price of oil in decline, unemployment among the young increased, and the government cut social benefits.

The long-governing dictator, 82-year-old President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, in power since 1999, in mid-February began to face demonstrations demanding his departure, and that of the entourage around him.

These are the high-ranking officials, wealthy businessmen and military officers who actually run the country. They got rich on public money.

After the army brutally crushed an Islamist insurgency in the 1990s that saw more than 200,000 deaths, following a coup negating an Islamist electoral victory, they chose ex-foreign minister Bouteflika to lead the country.

As the demonstrations grew larger, he at first announced he would not run for a fifth term. But this was rejected by the protesters who demanded he step down immediately.

Bouteflika’s fate was sealed once the army chief of staff, Gen. Ahmed Gaid Salah, threw his weight behind what he called the “legitimate demands” of the demonstrators, and resigned on April 2. And some high-level politicians, including two former prime ministers, have been arrested.

But protesters rejected an offer from interim President Abdelkader Bensalah to hold a dialogue, so no date for a presidential election has been set, the demonstrations continue, and the army remains the most powerful institution in the country.

Is Russia a Danger to the West?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

 

Ever since Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea, there has been a concerted campaign in western countries to depict Russia as an “evil empire” – to quote Ronald Regan’s phrase about the old Soviet Union.

Putin’s hand in supposedly destabilizing countries around the globe – including the United States – is now a common theme in western discourse.

How much of this is true? Russia is a major power that pursues its own national interests, the way every other state does. What else is new?

NATO, after all, took advantage of the Soviet Union’s collapse to move so far eastwards that it even incorporated the Baltic states, which had been integral parts of the USSR. And this expansion continues throughout eastern and southern Europe.

Just recently, the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, acceding to Greek demands, changed its name to North Macedonia, thus making it possible to avoid a Greek veto in its quest to join NATO. 

The alliance is of course ready to welcome it with open arms. On June 3, NATO’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, commended Prime Minister Zoran Zaev for making the reforms necessary to join the transatlantic military alliance next year.

It would become the 30th member of the U.S.-led group.

Three other ex-Yugoslav republics-- Slovenia, Croatia and Montenegro -- have already joined NATO, as have other countries in the Balkan region including Albania, Bulgaria and Romania.

Putin contends that by taking in Balkan members, the alliance is undermining security in the region. But this is blithely ignored as Russian paranoia. After all, isn’t NATO a force for good?

In a recently published book, Cambridge University historian Mark B. Smith warns against the prevailing view of Russia as an aggressor.  

In The Russia Anxiety: And How History Can Resolve It, he goes so far as to describe this distorted view of the country is actually pathological. Smith sees the controversy in the United States over Russian election meddling as just another example of this.

“The Russia Anxiety is a syndrome with three sets of symptoms: fear, contempt and disregard.” The remedy for this illness, Smith tells us, is to examine Russia’s history, “a platform from which to look at Russia more calmly, reasonably and accurately.”

Martin Aust, an historian at the University of Bonn in Germany, also subscribes to this point of view.
In his new book The Shadow of the Empire ― Russia since 1991, he maintains that Russia is not an empire.

“That becomes clear looking at the difference between Russia since 1991 and older iterations --czarism and the Soviet Union,” he said in a recent interview with the German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

Speaking about Putin’s 2014 incorporation of Crimea, which until 1954 had belonged to Russia, not Ukraine, he noted that “Crimea has an emotional value for Russia” that many don’t understand.

Aust thinks Putin was taken aback at the sharp western reaction to Russia’s regaining control of the peninsula, with its ethnic Russian majority, following the coming to power of an anti-Russian regime in Ukraine.

Until 2014, Moscow’s strong desire had been to keep the link between Ukraine and Russia as close as possible. Now, though, Russia faces continued animosity from Kyiv – and Washington.

Two Decades of Russia Under Putin

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 

It has now been two decades since Vladimir Putin took effective control of Russia.

In the summer of 1999 he was appointed Prime Minister of the Russian Federation by the ailing and increasingly unpopular President Boris Yeltsin, who knew he would lose another election if he ran again.  

At the end of the year, Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned and, according to the constitution, Putin became acting president. Yeltsin's resignation resulted in the election being held three months early; Putin won in the first round with 53 per cent of the vote. 

In one way or another, including another stint as prime minister, he’s been running the country ever since. Putin’s return to the Kremlin for a fourth presidential term in 2018 has seen Russian democracy weaken further and Russia’s relations with the West seriously deteriorate. 

Yet, within Russia, Putin’s position remains unchallenged and his foreign policy battles, and the annexation of Crimea, have received widespread public support.

What kind of country has Russia become since his accession to power? In his recently published book Contemporary Russian Politics, Neil Robinson, a professor of comparative politics at the University of Limerick in Ireland, maintains that Russia’s leaders feel they cannot co-operate with the West but must practice realpolitik. 

In 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians suffered the loss of some 17 per cent of their territory and 60 per cent of their population. 

While the Soviet Union was on paper an equal partnership of many different peoples held together by a complex system of ethno-federalism, in reality it was at its core a Russian entity which represented the geopolitical continuation of the old Tsarist Empire.

In modern Russian political discourse, the breakup of the USSR is regarded as a massive humiliation, stripping Russia of its military and industrial power. 

To make matters worse, during the Yeltsin years Russia’s cold war adversaries, in particular the United States, acted as victors and treated Russia, in Putin’s view, with contempt. 

American hegemony during the 1990s was unchallenged. President George H.W. Bush declared a “New World Order” with the collapse on the Soviet Union.

The Yeltsin years were also a disaster internally. Western support for Yeltsin discredited democracy rather than bolstered it.

European Union and NATO enlargement up to Russia’s very borders (and including, for that matter, the three Baltic States that had been part of the Soviet Union itself), with apparently no regard for Russian objections, increased Russian fears. 

For Putin, this had to stop – and he has since done his best to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from joining these organizations.

Putin sees Western rhetoric about democracy and rights as ploys to weaken Russia’s status as a great power and thinks it will not bring it acceptance in the eyes of its western rivals in any case.

Putin’s government therefore began to craft a political ideology of “sovereign democracy” and non-interference in the domestic affairs of other states.

This allows it to win support among the more authoritarian governments of the world, such as Iran and even Turkey, who see it as a counterweight to the West.

Russia’s intervention in Syria has also demonstrated to potential and existing friends that Russia is willing to use military force to prop up allies if required.

Domestically, though Putin has managed to curb the power of the biggest economic oligarchs that reigned supreme during the corrupt Yeltsin years, elites have continued to enrich themselves. 

Along with conservative voters, state bureaucrats, and workers in import-competing sectors, they benefit from the status quo.

For Robinson and other scholars who study Russian politics, the institutional and legal system of Russia as a modern state -- its democratic constitution and division of powers, multiparty parliamentary system, private and public law, and so forth – remains a mere shell, subordinated to the informal machinery of patron-client bonds, with Putin at its apex.

For political and economic actors in Russia, these bonds determine their access to various resources based on personal exchanges of loyalty and capital, not on formal laws and contracts.

Such susceptibility of state processes to elite machinations is of course dangerous. Robinson maintains that Putin has been much better at establishing a political system that supports his rule than he has at building up a state that can deliver material wealth and protection to the Russian people.

India's New Era Confirmed by Vote

By Henry Srebrnik, Fredericton [N.B.]  Daily Gleaner

India, the world’s largest democracy has spoken, loud and clear, on behalf of Hindu nationalism.

If there remained any doubts, this past May’s election results confirmed it. This isn’t Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi’s secular-socialist India anymore.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept back into power.

The party won 303 seats in the 545-seat Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s parliament, bettering the 282 seats they won in 2014.

That gave it the first back-to-back majority for a single party since 1984.

Modi won because he has been doing things right. His administration has focused on reforming and modernising India’s infrastructure and government, reducing bureaucracy, encouraging increased foreign direct investment, improving national standards of health and sanitation, and improving foreign relations.

The once-mighty Indian National Congress Party, led by Rahul Gandhi, which dominated India for its first three decades of independence, finished with a pathetic 52 seats.

Modi even criticized the once sacrosanct Nehru, Gandhi’s great-grandfather and India’s first prime minister, blaming him for the country’s border disputes with China and Pakistan and a lack of development while he was at the helm from 1947 to 1964.

India’s relationship with nuclear-armed rival Muslim-majority Pakistan became an issue in the lengthy election campaign – voting in the huge nation was spread over a six-week period -- after a suicide car bomb killed 40 Indian police officers in the contested Kashmir region in February.

The BJP espouses the nationalist doctrine known as Hindutva, which promotes the identification of national identity with the religious and cultural heritage of Hindus. It accused the Congress Party of being “soft” on Pakistan and “pampering” Kashmiri separatists.

Nationalists in the BJP want Modi to take a harder line on national security, as well as build a controversial temple on the site of a 16th-century mosque that was demolished by a Hindu mob in Ayodhya in 1992.

As he ran for re-election, Modi inaugurated a project in March that will radically transform the heart of Varanasi, Hinduism’s holiest city, which he represents in parliament, by carving a wide path from its Vishwanath Temple down to the Ganges River.

It is a place where Hindus believe they attain “moksha” (salvation) if they are cremated here upon their death. “It seems that God has chosen me” for this task, he stated. “This is sacred work on Earth.”

The project is raising anxieties among Varanasi’s Muslim community, which accounts for almost 30 per cent of its population. The temple sits adjacent to the Gyanvapi Mosque, which Hindu activists have long expressed a desire to destroy.

Muslims throughout India are feeling politically marginalized. Most voted for Congress or various regional parties. The BJP fielded only seven Muslim candidates in the 437 seats it contested.

However, in a speech delivered following his victory, Modi said he would work to win the trust of minorities.

While Modi’s first foreign visit since being elected is to India’s island neighbours Sri Lanka and the Maldives, none has been planned between him and Pakistan’s prime minister Imram Khan, when both will be attending the Shanghai Cooperation summit in Bishkek June 13-14.

That relationship remains as fraught as ever.

Beautiful Barcelona is a Sovereigntist Stronghold

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 

Last month I spent some time in what, to my mind, is the cleanest, loveliest and most orderly city in Europe – Barcelona.

There’s so much more to see besides Antoni Gaudi’s fantastic architectural marvels, including his magnificent Church of the Sagrada Familia.

Most tourists are less aware of the city’s rich left-wing history; it was a stronghold of the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War and one of the last to fall to General Francisco Franco’s forces. It held out until Jan. 26, 1939.

Although Franco died in 1975, only in 2011 were the last monuments to his victory torn down in Barcelona.

There are walking tours of civil war sites. One of them, using George Orwell’s book Homage to Catalonia, allows you to discover places that you may not find on your own.

It covers the 1936 People’s Olympiad; the city’s anarchist and socialist militias; revolutionary, Communist and Francoist violence; the Italian bombing of Barcelona; and final defeat.

Spain’s second-largest city, Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia, the autonomous Spanish region that is now home to a growing sovereigntist movement. This is something I deal with in a course on ethnic nationalism that I teach at UPEI.

In Barcelona’s municipal election, held on May 26, Ernest Maragall, running under the banner of the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) and Sovereigntists coalition, came first, ahead of the incumbent mayor, Ada Colau, a former housing activist.

France’s former prime minister Manuel Valls, who was born in the city and holds Spanish citizenship, came in a distant fourth, despite the banners advertising his candidacy which we saw all over the city.

The election was seen as a bellweather for the Catalan secessionist movement, almost two years after Catalonia was the scene of a failed attempt to secede from Spain, when separatist leaders who ran the region went ahead with an independence referendum despite a court ban.

In a tense vote held on Oct. 1, 2017 just over 40 per cent of Catalans made it to the polls, despite Madrid’s attempts to disrupt the referendum; 92 per cent said “yes” to nationhood.

That was followed by a declaration of independence before Spain’s then prime minister removed the Catalan government from office.

Spain invoked a part of its constitution that allowed direct rule over the region, removing the president of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, and charging him and another dozen or so politicians with crimes against the state.

Puigdemont has been living in Brussels to avoid prosecution in Spain. But ERC leader Oriol Junqueras, who was Catalonia’s vice-president at the time, is currently in jail as the trial before the Spanish Supreme Court over his and other politicians’ role in the secession bid continues.

Spanish prosecutors want to sentence Junqueras to 25 years in prison on charges of rebellion and other crimes.

Four of the Catalan leaders on trial -- all members of Puigdemont’s Catalan European Democratic Party (PDeCAT) – recently stated that separatists should be more flexible about working with other Spanish parties as long as those groups refuse to rule out an independence referendum as a “possible solution” for the region.

Meanwhile, Puigdemont, along with two other Catalan nationalists, was elected to the European Parliament in Spanish-wide elections held on the same day as the Barcelona election.

Their election is likely to be followed by a legal dispute over whether indicted Catalan separatists can seek European parliamentary immunity after winning their seats. So far this has been denied.

On May 29, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention called on Spain to release three of the jailed Catalan separatist leaders, including Junqueras, who have been denied bail while facing trial. Madrid refused.

A day earlier, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously rejected a case brought by Catalan politicians alleging Spain’s constitutional court violated their rights by blocking a session in the regional parliament at the height of the secession crisis.

There’s a Canadian angle to the story: in April Ottawa denied entry into Canada for Puigdemont, the night before he was to fly to Quebec for a tour sponsored by the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montréal, which advocates for Quebec’s independence.