A Caribbean Plural Society

By Henry Srebrnik. [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Rather than being what used to be called a “melting pot,” the Caribbean island nation of Trinidad and Tobago constitutes a “plural society,” that is, a place where two distinct ethnic groups live largely separate lives. 

Tthe population of some 1.36 million comprises Indo-Trinidadians at 35.4 per cent, Afro-Trinidadians at 34.2 per cent, and “mixed” at 22.8 per cent. 

The population also includes smaller groups of Whites, Chinese, Syrian-Lebanese and Amerindians.

Trinidad and Tobago’s plural society encompasses a multitude of religions such as Roman Catholicism, Hinduism, Islam, the Anglican and Baptist faiths, Pentecostals, Seventh Day Adventists and others. All this is reflected in its politics.

The 41 members of the House of Representatives are elected by first-past-the-post voting in single-member constituencies.

The People’s National Movement (PNM) is one of the two main parties. Founded by Dr. Eric Williams in 1956, it is the oldest political party in the country. Most of its supporters are Afro-Trinidadian, the descendants of people who were brought as slaves.

The Indo-Trinidadians, originally indentured labourers from South Asia, have voted for a number of parties through the years, most recently for the United National Congress (UNC), established in 1988 by the party’s former leader, Basdeo Panday.

Both parties have governed the country. The only other party to gain power through elections was the National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR), under the stewardship of Arthur Robinson.

It was voted into office in 1986 with a landslide victory over the ruling PNM by 33-3 seats. But the party only served one term and never won another mandate.

An election is scheduled to take place next year. Prime Minister Keith Rowley’s PNM currently holds 23 seats, while former UNC prime minister Kamla Persad-Bissesar has 17. Carolyn Seepersad-Bachan of the Congress of the People, an offshoot of the UNC, also sits in parliament.  

The nationalist movement aimed to unify the population into a singular mixed nation; however, it was exclusionary of Indo-Trinidadians due to the rivalry between the PNM and the Indian-Hindu opposition. 

Furthermore, Indo-Trinidadians were viewed as strong adherents to their culture, which made them more resistant to racial mixture and creolization. Conversely, Afro-Trinidadians were considered more likely to adopt creolization.

In fact Indo-Trinidadians feel they were systematically oppressed by the PNM, which has ruled the state for the majority of its history after independence from Great Britain in 1962.

So the postcolonial multicultural movement did not succeed since the two main parties were divided along ethnic and religious lines -- largely Hindu Indians and Christian Africans. They remained largely rooted in inter-racial animosity.

This was the product of a colonial “divide and rule” strategy and the effect of inbred competition in labour that British colonialism created. It was designed to prevent unity between the colonized groups.

Afro-Trinidadians worked in urban centres, whereas Indo-Trinidadians worked in rural areas. the Indians were given better living conditions and wages. The historical divide continues to shape the community today and creates geographic segregation.

However, there has been the rise of a “douglarization” ideal, where a racial and cultural mixture is seen as a possible solution to end interracial issues and jealousy. But it will not be easy to overcome the mistrust that exists.

A New Country in the Pacific?

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

 

On Nov. 23, the people of Bougainville, a small South Pacific island, began voting in a referendum which could make it the world’s newest independent country. Results will be known in mid-December.

Bougainville is currently part of Papua New Guinea (PNG), the eastern half of the island of New Guinea. The PNG is the most populous Pacific island state, with 8.7 million citizens. 

Bougainville is about 1,000 kilometres to the east of the PNG and is part of the Solomon Islands archipelago. (The remaining Solomons are a separate sovereign country.)

Bougainville has a population of 235,000, made up of 21 distinct language groups; its people are culturally distinct from Papuans.

From the 1880s until the end of the First World War, the island was part of German New Guinea. Australia then occupied it and in 1975 it became part of newly-independent PNG.

The reasons why the residents of Bougainville are voting on independence are rooted in the region’s colonial history, as well as events relating to a mine.

The island is rich in copper, and a huge open pit copper mine located at Panguna was at the center of violence in the late 1980s.

Panguna was the first major mining project in PNG, its single most important economic asset, essential to the economic viability of PNG as a newly independent state. 

During its 17 years of operation, the mine generated 44 per cent of PNG’s foreign-currency earnings. However, only 5.63 per cent of the mine’s earnings went to Bougainville.

Many Bougainvilleans were reluctant to remain in the PNG, advocating instead for a self-governing, independent nation of their own. In 1975 they unilaterally declared a Republic of the North Solomons but failed to secede from PNG.

A compromise was eventually reached, which included establishment of a provincial government system that yielded a modest degree of autonomy to Bougainville.

But the future of the mine remained contested by many on the island. Many Bougainvilleans alleged that the mine had devastating environmental consequences for the island. Locals felt dispossessed and exploited.

A Bougainville Revolutionary Army in 1987 began to carry out acts of sabotage against the mine, which led to its closure in 1989. In turn, the PNG government imposed a shipping, aviation and telephone blockade on the island, which remained in place for seven years.

In 2001, Bougainvillean rebels and PNG government leaders signed the Bougainville Peace Agreement, which ended the fighting that left at least 15,000 dead. It included a provision for a referendum within 10‐15 years on Bougainville’s future political status.

The referendum presents two options, either greater autonomy from PNG, or complete independence. However, a vote for independence would still require ratification from the Papuan parliament.

James Marape, the PNG prime minister, has expressed a clear preference for an autonomous, not independent, Bougainville. Bougainville regional president John Momis therefore cautioned voters and urged patience.

Polls indicate a vote for independence. This is being driven by the sense of separate ethnic identity from PNG, residual animosity after the war years, and a perceived failure of the current model of autonomy.

If Bougainville does become independent, the mine could conceivably be reopened and provide a valuable source of export revenue. And that would make the prospect of a self-sufficient and self-governing Bougainville very serious.

Sri Lanka Election Reinforces Sinhala Nationalism

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

 

Gotabaya Rajapaksa of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) won Sri Lanka’s presidential election on Nov. 16, with 52 per cent of the votes, beating Sajith Premadasa of the United National Party, who came second with 42 per cent. A total of 35 candidates were vying for votes.

Rajapaksa is the younger brother of Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was president from 2005-2015, during the final victory over the Tamil Tigers in 2009, ending a vicious civil war. Mahinda could not contest the 2019 election due to Sri Lanka’s presidential term limits.

Even though he is the son of a former president who was assassinated by Tamil rebels in 1993, Premadasa had strong support in minority Muslim and Tamil areas but a poor showing in larger Sinhalese constituencies. The two minorities together form about 22 per cent of Sri Lanka’s 21 million people.

Defeated in 2015 by a coalition led by Sirisena, who promised to reform the economy and break with Sri Lanka's history of human rights abuses, nepotism and corruption, the Rajapaksas are back in power, winning on the basis of ethnicity and religion.

Incumbent Maithripala Sirisena chose not to run again. after coming under criticism following the Easter Sunday bombings earlier this year.

The attack by Islamic State group-linked militants in April, which targeted churches and high-end hotels across the island, left at least 269 people dead. It devastated the tourism industry.

Many Sri Lankans believed the government had failed to protect them.The blasts led to riots targeting the island’s Muslims, mainly led by right-wing Sinhala Buddhist leaders.

The Rajapaksas are a political clan from Hambantota, in the south of the island. Mahinda followed his father into politics in the left-leaning, Sinhala-nationalist SLFP in the early 1970s.

In 2006, the Rajapaksa government launched a massive military offensive against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a separatist movement seeking to establish an independent state for Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority in the north and east of the country.

Within three years, the Tamil Tigers were defeated, ending nearly three decades of civil war in which more than 100,000 people are estimated to have died.

Mahinda and Gotabaya, who was defence secretary at the time, have had to deal with allegations that soldiers under their oversight committed war crimes, including the summary execution of surrendering fighters.

Disappearances continued into the years after the war ended, when businessmen, journalists and activists seen as opponents of the Rajapaksas were rounded up and never seen again.

Rajapaksa family members came to dominate many institutions of power and public offices. By one conservative estimate, Mahinda and two brothers controlled over 50 per cent of the national budget.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s victory may escalate ethnic tensions. In the lead up to the election, he said that he would not honour a United Nations resolution to investigate alleged abuses that occurred during the civil war.

He also announced he will appoint his brother Mahinda as prime minister. The election results have shown how polarised this country is.

The result is not good news for India. Rajapaksa plans to restore good relations with Sri Lanka’s top lender, China, while Premadasa was seen as leaning towards India and the United States.

Even Before War, Syria Was a Basket Case

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

The war in Syria is the defining conflict of this decade. From its origins in peaceful demonstrations for political reform, the confrontation between the Alawite regime and its opponents evolved into a regional and global proxy war. By now, at least half a million people have been killed.

At the centre is Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, who has weathered international condemnation to emerge still secure in power.

The protests that began in 2011, despite the ferment throughout the Arab world known as the Arab Spring, apparently took Assad by surprise. He fancied himself a more modern, rational ruler, not an autocrat like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak or a deluded fanatic like Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi.

Assad had married outside the family sect, and he had spent his formative years in London qualifying as an ophthalmologist. Many western leaders considered him a reformer.

His elder brother Bassel, to whom the presidency was meant to have passed, had died in a car accident in 1994.

But sectarian tensions, particularly between the majority Sunni Muslim community and Assad’s Alawite sect -- an offshoot of Shia Islam -- nonetheless escalated into violence, and Assad was faced with a state coming apart at the religious and ethnic seams. 

Soon enough, with the assistance of the army, the air force, semi-private Shi’ite militias, and a national network of intelligence agents, Assad began destroying rebellious communities -- executing civilians, looting, and burning homes.

Assad’s father Hafez, a far more brutal tyrant who ruled for 30 years until his death in 2000, dreamt of a single overarching ideology for Syria. It would be under the wing of the Ba’ath Party (“resurrection” or “renaissance” in Arabic). But it was not to be.

In line with the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, the French and British had divided the former Ottoman Middle East between themselves at the end of the First World War. 

The French occupied the northern Levant, from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates River and beyond – a 200,000 square-kilometre area. They quickly realized that their Syrian dominion was a patchwork of conflicting communities.

The polity they created was a collection of hostile ethnic and religious groups, even before little Lebanon was lopped off in order to create a Christian entity along the Mediterranean coast.

The Alawites were promised a fair amount of autonomy in their own area around Latakia, between Lebanon and Turkey. A nominally Shi’ite sect that most Muslims regarded as heretical, they were eager to associate with the new non-Muslim rulers. 

They provided the French with excellent soldiers and would later form the backbone of the Ba’ath Party’s armed forces in the independent country that emerged in 1946. 

The Druze community was a major power in the mountainous areas south of Damascus and were initially provided with an entity of their own. Later, Jabal Druze were merged into a single Syrian state with Damascus and Aleppo.

Independence brought a succession of military regimes and even a brief incorporation into Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s United Arab Republic between 1958 and 1961. 

Finally, the Assads took over in 1970, coopting all non-Sunni or non-Arab minorities, such as Kurds and various Christian sects, in order to check the majority Sunnis.

They have held on for dear life – literally – ever since.