Are the Jews of Israel an Aboriginal People?

I have recently read two articles, A Native and a Zionist, and Native, Jewish Bond Thicker Than Water, by Ryan Bellerose, published last March in the Métropolitain, a Montreal newspaper, and reprinted in the Jewish Tribune, and last June in the Toronto Sun, respectively.

The author is a Métis from Alberta. He founded Canadians for Accountability, a native rights advocacy group, and is an organizer and participant in the Idle No More movement in Calgary. And he calls himself a Zionist.

Citing the work of anthropologist José R. Martínez-Cobo, Bellerose concludes that Jews fit the definition of an aboriginal people. Their lands were occupied, first by the Romans, then by the Arabs in the seventh century. While different Jewish communities have slightly different traditions, they all share the same root culture and it has remained unchanged. And they have resurrected their traditional language, Hebrew.

“Alone among other nations, Jews’ language, history, culture and folklore were born and forged in the Holy Land. There is no statute of limitations on being indigenous. In stark contrast, Arabs arrived to the Holy Land only in the seventh century, when Arabian armies colonized the Middle East. Longstanding presence may generate rights, but it is not synonymous with being indigenous,” he wrote.

Liberal MP and former justice minister Irwin Cotler agrees. The Jewish people, he has stated, is the only people in the Middle East that still inhabits the same land, embraces the same religion, studies the same Torah, harkens to the same prophets, speaks the same aboriginal language – Hebrew – and bears the same aboriginal name, Israel, as it did 3,500 years ago.

No other people in the region, including today’s Palestinian Arabs, can make that claim, since their cultures all derive from Christianity or Islam, neither of which existed back then.

Israel, then, is the aboriginal homeland of the Jewish people across space and time and is, Cotler asserts, a successor state to the biblical, or aboriginal, Jewish kingdoms.

So why do few people (other than Jews) see us as the indigenous people in Israel? Is it simply that we were outside the land of Israel for too long? But some North American and Australian natives lost their lands and sovereignty at least 300 years ago, yet they are still referred to, in Canada, as ‘first nations.’

Nor did Jews vanish: they continued to live in the region, albeit as “dhimmis,” second-class people who did not enjoy certain political rights reserved to Muslims, and who were subject to payment of special taxes. In 1945 there were between 758,000 and 866,000 Jews living in communities throughout the Arab world; Jerusalem had a Jewish majority in the 19th century.

No, the reason for the denial of Jewish nationhood is the religious theory known as ‘supersessionism.’ From its inception, the founders of Christianity taught that G-d’s ‘Old Covenant’ with the Jewish people was fulfilled and was now replaced (superseded) by the ‘New Covenant in Christ,’ and so Judaism (and the Jews) were supposed to disappear. The Church was the ‘new Israel.’

Centuries later, theologians of Islam adopted similar views, which helps explain the hatred by many in the Arab and larger Muslim world toward Israel. Jews were not just ‘settlers’ taking Palestinian land (the way European colonists did in Africa, Australia and the Americas) but were an inferior people for whom Muslims had been taught to show contempt.

More recent, secular versions of supersessionism can be found in the various Marxist screeds against Zionism. Karl Marx himself denied Jews were a nation but rather a “caste,” surviving only because of their economic usefulness to the larger society, and Communists usually opposed the idea of a Jewish state. The animus against Jewish nationhood can also be found in works such as those of the British historian Arnold Toynbee, in which he spoke of the Jewish people in terms of a “fossilized civilization.”

When it comes to the denial of the right of Jews to exercise sovereignty in the land of Israel, what we sometimes find is an underlying theological condition.

The Evolution of South Asia's Nuclear Powers

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

While much of the world’s attention these days is focused on Iran’s nuclear program, it should not be forgotten that its eastern neighbours Pakistan and India, South Asia’s two largest countries and long-time enemies, both are nuclear-armed states.

India is not a party to the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and tested what it called a “peaceful nuclear explosive” in 1974. The test was the first after the creation of the NPT, and India’s secret development of nuclear weaponry, using civilian nuclear technology, caused great concern and anger from nations such as Canada, that had supplied its nuclear reactors for peaceful and power generating needs.

Indian officials had rejected the NPT in the 1960s on the grounds that it created a world of nuclear “haves” and “have-nots.” The Indian position asserted that the NPT was in many ways a neo-colonial regime designed to deny security to post-colonial powers.

Even after its 1974 test, India maintained that its nuclear capability was primarily “peaceful,” but in 1998 India tested weaponized nuclear warheads, including a thermonuclear device. Today India is estimated to have up to 100 nuclear warheads.

In 2008 the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) approved an agreement with India under which the agency gained access to India’s civilian nuclear reactors. As a result, India was granted a waiver allowing it to access civilian nuclear technology and fuel from other countries, including the United States. Both President George W. Bush and his successor Barack Obama have agreed that the world’s largest democracy is a responsible nuclear power.

The IAEA’s Director General, Yukiya Amano visited India last March to hear from Indian policy makers, scientists, researchers and engineers on developments in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

But India is also expanding its ability to produce highly enriched uranium for military purposes, including more powerful nuclear weapons, according to a U.S.-based think tank which cited satellite imagery taken last April of a gas centrifuge facility under construction at the Rare Materials Plant near Mysore in Karnataka.

The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) published a report in 2013 stating that this new facility “could significantly increase India’s ability to produce highly enriched uranium for military purposes, including more powerful nuclear weapons.”

Pakistan, too, is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and built its first nuclear power plant near Karachi with equipment and materials supplied mainly by western nations in the early 1970s. Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had promised in 1965 that if India built nuclear weapons then Pakistan would too, “even if we have to eat grass.”

In July 1982, General Vernon Walters was sent by President Ronald Reagan to see Pakistani dictator Muhammad Zia ul-Haq. The United States had “incontrovertible proof,” Walters told him, that Pakistan had accelerated its nuclear bomb program, despite assurances to the contrary.

Zia, former diplomat Husain Haqqani writes in a new book, Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding, claimed he had “no knowledge” of such a program. Needless to say, this was an “untruth.”

In 1998, Pakistan conducted its first six nuclear tests at the Chagai Hills, in response to the five tests conducted by India a few weeks before. In 2004, the Pakistani metallurgist A.Q. Khan, a key figure in Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, confessed to having sold gas centrifuge technology to North Korea, Iran, and Libya, though he denied complicity by the Pakistani government or army.

“Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal probably consists of approximately 90-110 nuclear warheads, although it could be larger,” according to a report released last year by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), an independent research wing of the U.S. Congress.

“Islamabad is producing fissile material, adding to related production facilities, and deploying additional delivery vehicles. These steps could enable Pakistan to undertake both quantitative and qualitative improvements to its nuclear arsenal,” the report said.

Given Pakistan’s chronic instability there is always the danger that such weapons could conceivably fall into the hands of Islamist extremist groups should the country implode.

As Robert Kagan noted in his book The Revenge of Geography, published in 2012, “A state like Pakistan can have weapons of mass destruction, even as it can barely provide municipal services and protect its population from suicide bombers.”

As well, any conflict with India over disputed Kashmir could easily touch off a major conflagration.

Turning Mammals Into People

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

A few months ago I was talking to a friend who teaches history at St. Mary’s University in Halifax. She bemoaned the lack of historical and geographical knowledge of many people in her courses and described one particularly egregious case. 

She had asked a student to describe some of the aggressive behaviour among European countries that had led to the Second World War. He began talking about Jacques Cartier – in other words, confusing the events of the 1930s with those of European expansion into the Americas in the 16^th century! Such is, sometimes, the astounding lack of knowledge about the most basic of facts.

At campuses everywhere, the humanities are hurting, as students gravitate to majors more closely linked to their career ambitions, and so we will hear more and more such stories. But the mission of a university goes far beyond creating a competent work force through training students for this or that functional task.

To get back to my conversation with my colleague, I told her I’ve come to the conclusion that my job as a teacher, first and foremost, is turning mammals into human beings. What do I mean by that?

Most mammals are highly developed creatures, and are intimately aware of their immediate environs and how to survive in them. But what is it that differentiates one particular species, homo sapiens, from the rest?

Cats, dogs, monkeys, and even the great apes, live in a spatial and chronological “present.” They are aware of their physical surroundings, and their territory may extend to even a dozen square miles in some cases. But beyond that, they know about virtually nothing. 

If they live on Prince Edward Island, unless they’ve been transported somewhere else by people, they have no idea about the rest of the world, from neighbouring New Brunswick to far-off China or Russia. They can’t communicate with fellow creatures beyond their immediate habitat.

They also have no sense of their history. They don’t even know about the lives of their immediate ancestors, much less something that happened a century or two earlier.

Unfortunately, I have run across students in my classes who cannot find the Pacific Ocean on a blank map, nor have any idea why 1939 is an important year in modern history. (To give you a sense of what it’s like not to have an historical time frame in your head, try to answer the following: what happened in the years 1423 and 5763? Actually, they are the Muslim and Jewish calendar equivalents to 2003 – the year the United States invaded Iraq.)

Such students may have some knowledge of a recent event that took place within their lifetime – say, the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States – but little beyond that. They probably know who Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were, but not Benito Mussolini or Nikita Khrushchev. As for geography, while they have seen pictures of various places on television or in films, and so might recognize downtown New York or Toronto, the larger geographic context is often missing. And knowing where Australia or India are located on the planet is too much to expect from some. 

Theirs is a world almost as circumscribed, and their horizons almost as limited, as those of their fellow mammals. I couldn’t imagine living in a world without being able to visualize, so to speak, the geographic and historical setting within which it exists. Can someone understand today’s France or the United States without some knowledge of their histories and their specific locations? I know I wouldn’t be able to. But of course other mammals live out their lives that way, and do just fine.

For a person, though, that is a terribly limited way to go through life. (And in any case even remote places may have a powerful impact on our lives.) It’s our job to make our students part of what used to be called the great chain of being and have them realize that there is more to the world than the here and now. 

If you have no comprehension of time and space beyond your immediate surroundings, you can’t make sense of the world. We were all mammals when we were born, but education is what turns us into humans.

Pakistan: A Turbulent, Nuclear-Armed Country

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Throughout its turbulent history, Pakistan, a country of 180 million people – the second largest Muslim state in the world -- has been subject to periodic military coups, often the result of mismanagement by corrupt civilian politicians.

It also suffers from a homegrown Taliban-led insurgency in the Pashtun-inhabited Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas along the border with Afghanistan, and mounting anger over CIA drone strikes, especially in North Waziristan.

Six police officers were killed on Jan. 12 in back-to-back bombings targeting an adviser to Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in the Martoong area of the Swat valley, which the Taliban controlled from 2007-2009.

Other parts of the country also experience terrorism. In the large port city of Karachi, with its 17 million people, ethnic and political divisions fan the violence. There is considerable animosity between the native Sindis, Pashtuns from the war-torn region along the Afghan border, and Muhajirs, the term for Muslims from elsewhere in India who moved into what became Pakistan after the 1947 partition from India. From 2010 through 2013, some 3,900 people were killed in terror and crime related activities.

There has also been deadly violence against Shi’ite Muslims, who comprise about 15-20 per cent of the population, by Sunni extremists. Last year there were 687 sectarian killings, a 22 percent increase over 2012, according to the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies; most of the victims were Shi’ites.

Sectarian unrest is spreading throughout the country and becoming routine in heavily populated areas, the group concluded. Last November, Sunnis and Shi’ites clashed in Rawalpindi, a military garrison city adjacent to Islamabad.

On Jan. 6, a suicide bomber tried to enter a school filled with several hundred students in a Shi’ite-dominated village in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, but was stopped by a ninth-grader, who is being hailed as a national hero after he died when the bomb went off in the ensuing scuffle.

Extremists are apparently trying to intimidate educated Shi’ites into leaving the country, asserted Salman Zaidi, a deputy director of the Jinnah Institute, an Islamabad-based think tank. All told, the toll of violence and terrorism in Pakistan caused 4,725 fatalities last year.

What makes this all the worse is that Pakistan is a nuclear-armed state, and there is always the danger that such weapons could conceivably fall into the hands of extremist groups should the country implode.

“Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal probably consists of approximately 90-110 nuclear warheads, although it could be larger,” according to a report released last year by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), an independent research wing of the U.S. Congress.

“Islamabad is producing fissile material, adding to related production facilities, and deploying additional delivery vehicles. These steps could enable Pakistan to undertake both quantitative and qualitative improvements to its nuclear arsenal,” the report said.

Though Pakistan has in recent years taken a number of steps to increase international confidence in the security of its nuclear arsenal, the CRS report cautioned that increased instability in Pakistan has called the extent and durability of these precautions into question.

Pakistan’s President Mamnoon Hussain and Prime Minister Sharif, both elected last summer, clearly have their hands full.

Two of the World's Great Canals

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Two of the world’s great maritime powers, Great Britain and the United States, whose commerce and security depended on ocean-going vessels, were responsible for the planet’s two most famous canals, located in Panama and Egypt.

The 77-kilometre long international waterway known as the Panama Canal, completed in 1914, allows ships to pass between the Atlantic Ocean and Pacific Ocean, saving 12,875 kilometres from a journey around the southern tip of South America, Cape Horn.

Panama was a part of Colombia but when that country rejected U.S. plans to build a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, Washington engineered a revolution that led to the independence of Panama in 1903. Following the Spanish-American War of 1898, the U.S. had become a world power with far-flung possessions in the Caribbean and Pacific and a canal would facilitate trade and defence.

The new Panamanian government authorized the U.S. to build the Panama Canal and allowed American control of a zone eight kilometres wide on either side of it.

The division of the country into two parts by the Panama Canal Zone caused tension throughout the twentieth century, including anti-American riots. In 1977, U.S. President Jimmy Carter signed a treaty which would return 60 per cent of the Canal Zone to Panama in 1979. The treaty also established the canal as a neutral international waterway; even in times of war any vessel is guaranteed safe passage. The canal and remaining territory was returned to Panama on December 31, 1999.

In recent years the amount of cargo shipped worldwide annually has continued to increase, a growth driven in part by rapidly expanding economies in Asia. About five per cent of worldwide shipping traffic passes through the Panama Canal, including nearly 70 per cent of all cargo to and from the U.S.

In 2007, the Panamanian government launched a $5.25 billion, seven-year project to expand and improve the canal. The project is scheduled for completion in time for the canal’s centennial anniversary this coming August.

In November U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden went to Panama to highlight the expansion of the canal and the need to modernize American ports to accommodate the huge cargo ships that by 2015 will pass through the isthmus.

The 193-kilometre long Suez Canal, located in Egypt, provides the shortest sea route between Asia and Europe. It connects the Mediterranean Sea with the Gulf of Suez, a northern branch of the Red Sea, from where ships then proceed onward to the Indian Ocean. The distance between Mumbai and London is roughly 11,450 kilometres using the Suez Canal but 20,000 kilometres taking the longer route around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa.

In 1858, the Universal Suez Ship Canal Company, owned by French and Egyptian interests, was formed and construction began in 1859. After its opening ten years later, the Suez Canal had a significant impact on world trade as it dramatically reduced transit time worldwide and the Convention of Constantinople in 1888 made the canal available for all ships from any nation.

In 1875, debt forced Egypt to sell its shares in ownership of the Suez Canal to the United Kingdom. For the British, the canal vastly increased trade with their south Asian possessions.

In the 20th century, conflicts began to arise over control of the Suez Canal. In 1936 Britain was given the right to maintain military forces in the Suez Canal Zone and control its entry points. In 1954, Cairo and London signed a seven year contract that allowed Egypt to take control of the former British installations.

In July 1956, however, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, angry that Britain and the U.S. withdrew support for his plan to build the Aswan High Dam on the Nile River, nationalized the canal.
On October 29 of that year, Israel invaded Egypt and two days later Britain and France followed suit.

The aims of the attack were primarily to regain Western control of the canal and to remove Nasser from power. In retaliation, Egypt blocked the canal by intentionally sinking 40 ships. The Suez Canal did not reopen until March 1957 when the sunken ships were removed.

In June 1967, another war between Egypt and Israel again shut the canal. At the end of the war, Egyptian and Israeli forces were stationed on either side of the canal and it remained closed until the end of a second conflict – the Yom Kippur War – and subsequent negotiations. It finally reopened in 1975.

Today, the Suez Canal is operated by the Suez Canal Authority, and the canal handles about eight per cent of the world’s shipping traffic. So far, despite some minor incidents, such as a bomb detonated at a police camp in the Suez Canal city of Ismailia last month, Egypt’s political turmoil has not affected it.

Future plans for the Suez Canal include a project to widen and deepen the canal to accommodate the passage of larger and more ships at one time. Nearly 150 years after its completion, it remains a vital link between Europe and Asia.

Harper, Israel, and Canada's Jewish Community

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian


On January 20, Prime Minister Stephen Harper will begin a four-day visit to Israel, as well as to Jordan and the Palestinian Territory on the West Bank. When he addresses the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, he will be greeted like a rock star.

Calling Israel “the light of freedom and democracy in what is otherwise a region of darkness” at a dinner in his honour hosted by the Jewish National Fund in Toronto in early December, Harper vowed that Canada would always be a friend. “We understand that the future of our country and of our shared civilization depends on the survival and thriving of that free and democratic homeland of the Jewish people in the Middle East.”

Harper is unabashedly pro-Israel and makes no secret of it. In the United Nations and other international bodies, where Israel routinely comes under attack, Canada is arguably its most consistent defender. No country, not even the United States, has been as steadfast a supporter of the Jewish state as Canada has been since 2006, when Harper’s Conservative Party replaced the Liberals in office.

That same year, he supported Israel in its war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. And Canada boycotted the UN’s 2009 Durban II anti-racism conference in South Africa because of its history of Israel-bashing.

In 2012, Ottawa cut off diplomatic ties with Iran, and it remains “deeply skeptical” of the recently-signed nuclear deal between Iran and the five members of the UN Security Council plus Germany.

“Simply put, Iran has not earned the right to have the benefit of the doubt,” stated Foreign Minister John Baird. Canada will continue to implement tough economic sanctions on the country.

In turn, Harper has earned the gratitude of a large sector of the Canadian Jewish community, in terms of electoral, financial and ideological support. He now has the almost unquestioning backing of most of the Orthodox Jewish community, the fraternal organization B’nai B’rith, and other groups.

This is a remarkable achievement, for a number of reasons.

For most of the 20th century Canada’s Jewish community was solidly Liberal – indeed, at various times even the New Democrats and their predecessor, the CCF, had more support among Jews than did the old Progressive Conservative Party. A Jewish Tory was an oddity.

As well, Harper’s political career began in the early 1990s within the Reform Party, the grassroots populist right-wing movement founded in Alberta – a province geographically and politically alien to most Canadian Jews, the vast majority of whom live in Montreal and Toronto.

Most Jews considered Reform as being, at the very least, antipathetic to Jewish concerns and values, if not (in the views of some) actually anti-Jewish.

But the Reform Party eventually morphed into the Canadian Alliance and then the Conservative Party of Canada, with Harper at the helm. And a most remarkable thing happened: he gained the confidence of Canada’s Jewish community, thanks mainly to his loyalty to Israel during difficult times.

In the May 2011 federal election, an Ipsos Reid exit poll found that among Jewish voters, 52 per cent voted Conservative, compared to 24 per cent who voted Liberal and 16 per cent who voted NDP. This is an astounding turnaround, given the deep historic ties between the Jewish community and the Liberal Party.

In the greater Toronto area riding of Thornhill, where 36.6 per cent of the population is Jewish, the highest in Canada, Conservative Peter Kent beat the Liberal candidate, Karen Mock, by 61.3 per cent to 23.6 per cent. This had been a very safe Liberal seat between 1997 and 2008.

The Montreal riding of Mount Royal, with an electorate that is 36.3 per cent Jewish, has arguably for decades been the most solid Liberal seat in the country; the Liberals have held the riding continuously since 1940. This was former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s own seat between 1965 and 1984; he was a man Montreal’s Jews adored.

Yet former Liberal attorney-general and justice minister Irwin Cotler barely hung on to Mount Royal in the last election, beating Conservative challenger Saulie Zajdel with 41.4 per cent of the vote to Zajdel’s 35.6 per cent. Polling there demonstrated that a majority of Jews in the constituency voted Conservative; Cotler himself acknowledged that he didn’t get the support of most Jewish electors and only kept his seat thanks to the non-Jewish vote.

When Cotler had first won the riding in a by-election in 1999 he received 91.9 per cent of the votes cast; the Progressive Conservative candidate obtained less than four per cent.

Of course the Liberal “brand” is not dead yet. The new Liberal leader, Justin Trudeau, recently acquired the support of Stephen Bronfman as the party’s chief fundraiser. Bronfman is a scion of the “first family” of Canadian Jewry – he is a grandson of Sam Bronfman, who built the Seagram liquor empire.

Montreal’s Jews, with their fear of Quebec separatism, remain more loyal to the party of Pierre Trudeau than do their counterparts elsewhere.

But now it will be the Liberals, not the Conservatives, who will have to fight all the harder if they wish to regain the Jewish vote.
Henry

The Traditional Systems of Justice of Pashtuns and Somalis

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer 

Two peoples living thousands of miles apart, one in the horn of Africa, the other in south-central Asia, employ similar systems of justice and conflict resolution.

The Pashtuns (also known as Pathans) live in eastern and southern Afghanistan; and in Pakistan, mostly in the old North West Frontier Province, now Khyber-Pakhtunkwa, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and northern Balochistan.

The Somalis are found in Somalia, a country which has been without a national government since 1991; the de facto state of Somaliland; Djibouti; and parts of Ethiopia and Kenya.

Until the colonial era, both peoples lived in stateless societies without courts of law. They both have very complex clan and tribal loyalties, and these sub-units have historically engaged in feuds among themselves, which were settled, if at all, by traditional methods of adjudication. 

The 43 million Pashtuns are divided into four confederacies: the Batani, Gharghasht, Karlani,  and Sarabans, which in turn consist of hundreds of tribes and sub-tribes. The 16 million Somalis comprise six major clans: the Darood, Dir, Digil, Hawiye, Isaaq, and Rahanwayne. These are also subdivided into a host of sub-clans and lineage groups.

Perhaps this is the reason neither people, despite a very strong consciousness of common ethnic, cultural and religious identity (virtually all are Sunni Muslims), has ever generated a modern state-building form of nationalism.

Pashtunwali is the non-written ethical code of the Pashtuns. It dates back to pre-Islamic times and is widely practiced among Pashtuns. They have relied on it to conduct themselves as individuals and as a society in their dealings between themselves and with others. The pashtunwali serves as a set of guidelines for regulating the otherwise anarchic Pashtun society.

One of its principles is badal, a concept which requires a Pashtun to seek justice or take revenge against the wrongdoer. There is no time limit to when the injustice can be avenged. If badal is not exercised, the offended man or his family will be considered stripped of honour. The exercise of this principle can lead to generations of bloodshed, feuds, and hundreds of lives lost for one insult. 

However, once the desire for an honorable peace is clear, the tribal elders gather in a jirga, which is obeyed without question by the Pashtuns. It is an assembly of tribal elders, who take decisions on issues based on consensus. In tribal regions, the jirga is still used as a court for criminal offences.

Somali clans are bound to each other by a social contract known as xeer. Under xeer, there is no authority that dictates what the law should be. It is instead formulated by elders as they determine the best way to resolve a dispute. Disputing parties bring their concerns to them, and the proceedings continue until a resolution is achieved.

Law, and consequently crime, is defined in terms of property rights. Because such rights, if violated, require compensation, rather than punishment, there is no imprisonment, and fines are rare. Such fines as might be imposed seldom exceed the amount of compensation and are paid directly to the victim.

Through xeer, Somalis are committed to paying restitution in the event that physical harm or death is inflicted by a member of one group against a member of another. If a member of one group murders someone, it is the responsibility of the murderer’s group to collectively pay restitution to the group of the victim. If payments are not made or accepted, then vengeance will be taken against any member of the offender’s group.

Xeer can give relationships regularity and reduce violence by creating structures of deterrence. Though enforced by custom and not written law, it is widely followed among Somalis.

The unrecognized state of Somaliland is founded on clan-based power sharing and balanced political representation and it headed off incipient violence soon after its declaration of independence through a shir beeleed (clan conference). The country has incorporated traditional institutions into its government by appointing clan leaders to the 82-member Guurtiida (House of Elders), the upper chamber of parliament. If a clan elder dies or retires, the seat is passed down to one of his descendants. Over the past two decades, clan elders have negotiated inter-clan disputes and kept the peace.

As Muslims, Pashtuns and Somalis may also avail themselves of the Islamic code of justice, the Sharia; however, in most cases not involving religion, pashtunwali and xeer take precedence in the traditions of these two ethnic groups.

But this also helps explain the attraction of Islamists – al-Shabaab among the Somalis and the Taliban in the Pashtun areas. For brutal as they are, their religious fervour enables the Islamists to bring feuding clans together through their harsh and rigid implementation of the Sharia, which supersedes pashtunwali and xeer, and thus, in a way, brings a modicum of peace and safety to these fractious societies. It accustoms them to a form of government that transcends tribe and clan.

Terrorist Bombings in Volgograd Lead to Worries About Winter Olympics

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Late in December, suicide bombers were responsible for the deaths of at least 34 people in the southern Russian city of Volgograd, in attacks on a railway station and a trolleybus. In October, a woman from Dagestan killed seven people in a suicide bus blast in the city.

The bombings raised fears of further attacks before Russia hosts the Winter Olympics in Sochi in February. Volgograd, the former Stalingrad, the city made famous in World War II, lies about 650 kilometres northeast of Sochi and is the main gateway to the Black Sea resort.

Evidence in the two recent blasts points to Islamist terrorists, most probably Chechens. In July, Chechen jihadist leader Doku Umarov pledged that his militants would disrupt the Sochi games. Sochi itself lies not far from the restive republics of Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia, in the northern Caucasus, the sites of ongoing Islamist terrorism.

 “We know that on the bones of our ancestors, on the bones of many, many Muslims who died and are buried on our territory along the Black Sea, today they plan to stage the Olympic Games. We, as the Mujahedeen, must not allow this to happen by any means possible,” Umarov declared.

The most restive of the numerous peoples living in the Caucasus, the Chechens have chafed under Russian domination for 150 years. In the recent past, they have fought two bloody wars, in 1994-1996 and 1999-2000, for independence; the conflict left at least one hundred thousand dead and the capital, Grozny, a wasteland. Most ethnic Russians living in Chechnya at the time fled. Umarov fought in both these wars.

Although they lost the two wars, a new constitution granted Chechnya in 2003 did give the republic more autonomy within the Russian Federation. This did not satisfy extremists, though, and in recent years, the resistance to Moscow has been infused by religious nationalism and calls for the establishment of an Islamic Caucasian Emirate became louder.

Though Russian forces have tried to keep a tight grip on the Caucasus, this dream has not died. In 2007, Umarov proclaimed himself emir of a Islamic Caucasian state ruled by Sharia law.

“Today in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Palestine, our brothers are fighting,” he said at the time. “Everyone who attacked Muslims, wherever they are, are our enemies, common enemies. Our enemy is not Russia only, but everyone who wages war against Islam and Muslims.”

Vladimir Putin’s Russia will have its hands full protecting not only Sochi, but much of the country, over the next few months.

The Gathering Academic Storm Enveloping Israel

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Earlier this month, the 5,000-member American Studies Association (ASA) voted more than two to one to endorse a scholarly boycott against Israeli universities.  It asked its members to refuse to "enter formal collaboration with Israeli academic institutions or with scholars who are expressly serving as representatives or ambassadors of those institutions, or on behalf of the Israeli government."

Boycotting Israel "represents a principle of solidarity with scholars and students deprived of their academic freedom and an aspiration to enlarge that freedom for all, including Palestinians."

Why are academics, supposedly devoted to the free exchange of ideas and knowledge, voluntarily cutting off contacts with fellow scholars? Actually, there's a history behind this and it doesn't bode well for Israel.

The movement to demonize, delegitimize and eventually eliminate the state of Israel has been gathering steam ever since the World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa in 2001, where Israel was singled out for special condemnation as a "racist" state practising "apartheid."

In April 2004, sixty Palestinian academic and non-government organizations called for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. The worldwide Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has grown in the years since; its objective is to force Israel through various boycotts to comply with its goals: The end of Israeli occupation and colonisation of Arab land, full equality for Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, and respect for the right of return of Palestinian refugees into Israel itself (which would likely turn it into a non-Jewish country).

The BDS movement, already a force in the British academic community, is now spreading to the United States. In the wake of the Gaza war fought between Israel and Hamas between December 2008 and January 2009, a group of American university professors launched a campaign calling for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel.

"As educators of conscience, we have been unable to stand by and watch in silence Israel's indiscriminate assault on the Gaza Strip and its educational institutions," the U.S. Campaign for the Academic  & Cultural Boycott of Israel stated in its inaugural press release.

In April the 800-member Association for Asian American Studies voted to support a boycott, the first American academic group to do so. Their resolution contended that the boycott was "in protest of the illegal occupation of Palestine, the infringements of the right to education of Palestinian students, and the academic freedom of Palestinian scholars and students in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel."

Next month, the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in Chicago will debate a resolution calling on the State Department to criticize Israel for barring American professors from going to Gaza and the West Bank when invited by Palestinian universities. With 30,000 members, the MLA is a much larger body than the ASA.

"The debate at ASA breached a taboo that existed about how people discuss Israel and Palestine," explained David Lloyd, an English professor at the University of California at Riverside, who will speak in favor of an academic boycott at the MLA meeting. "ASA has paved the way for MLA and other associations."

These are organizations with professors from many institutions and covering many disciplines, he added, maintaining that the discussions indicate a "larger, nationwide shift" regarding Israel. "It's beginning to become something people recognize as an issue of justice and ceases to be something held by a vocal minority."

The 749-member Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) will also be debating a resolution in support of an academic boycott of Israel at the group's national conference next May in Austin, Texas.

The NAISA Council has encouraged its members to boycott Israeli academic institutions to protest "the infringement of the academic freedom of Indigenous Palestinian academics and intellectuals in the Occupied Territories and Israel who are denied fundamental freedoms of movement, expression, and assembly."

Ohio State University English Professor Chadwick Allen, the president, said the move followed a member-generated petition asking that the group formally support the boycott.

Another group potentially considering anti-Israel measures is the 62,000-member American Library Association, where several members have called for action against Israel.

Many academics are incensed at the way Israel is being singled out, noting that these scholarly groups have not taken it upon themselves to boycott, among others, China, Iran, Russia, Syria, or Zimbabwe - countries with far worse records. This is true but it doesn't change the fact that Israel is losing the battle within the academic community, once a reliable friend of the Jewish state.

For years, pro-Israel activists have tended to minimize the impact of the BDS movement and claimed that it has not been successful in shaping public opinion regarding Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. They are wrong.

A Tilt to the Left in South America

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Many people remember the blustery late president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, long a thorn in the side of the United States. A populist par excellence, Chavez, who died in March, referred to his ideology as Bolivarianismo (“Bolivarianism”), based on the ideals of the 19th century soldier who led the fight for South American independence from Spain, Simon Bolivar.

He was an exponent of anti-imperialism, national sovereignty, and grassroots political participation. His hand-picked successor, Nicolas Maduro, who was his vice-president and minister of foreign affairs, is carrying on his legacy.

The National Assembly has granted Maduro decree powers that will allow him to create laws on his own without legislative approval. The president insists that he needs the powers to address the country’s grave economic difficulties, for which he blames an “economic war” being waged by the political opposition.

But Venezuela is not the only country in South America which has tilted to the left in recent years. In Bolivia, the left-wing Movement for Socialism-Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples (MAS-IPSP) is now in power. Its leader, President Juan Evo Morales, was first elected in 2005 and re-elected four year later. This followed years of discontent with International Monetary Fund-imposed austerity measures instituted by his predecessors.
A member of the Aymara people, Morales has focused on issues affecting indigenous and poor communities. He has instituted land reform, redistribution of wealth from natural gas and petroleum extraction, and nationalisation of key industries.

Peru has now elected two presidents of aboriginal Quechua descent, Alejandro Toledo and Ollanta Humala. This has been a breakthrough, in a country ruled for most of its history by a privileged ethnic Spanish oligarchy that owned most of the land and resources, and was protected by the country’s military. Native peoples were politically marginalized within a highly stratified society with a racial hierarchy.

After winning in 2001, Toledo brought together experts and indigenous leaders to discuss the needs of indigenous people throughout the country. His symbolic inauguration ceremony at the Inca ruins at Machu Picchu was attended by all the presidents of the neighboring Andean states, who joined him in signing the “Declaration of Machu Picchu,” promising to protect indigenous rights.

Humala, the current leader, in office since 2011, also came in as a left-wing reformer. He has created or bolstered some social programs, and poverty in Peru has been cut by more than half in recent years, falling from 59 per cent of the population in 2004 to 26 per cent last year, according to government figures. Political polarization has decreased.

Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s president since 2007, is a popular leader who in 2008 declared the national debt “illegitimate,” having been contracted by corrupt and despotic prior regimes. His administration has reduced the high levels of poverty, indigence, and unemployment in Ecuador.

In Paraguay, Fernando Lugo won the presidency in 2008 but was removed four years later. A Roman Catholic priest, Lugo was ordained a bishop in 1994. He gained prominence by backing peasant claims for better land distribution. Resigning his Church position, he became the candidate of the Patriotic Alliance for Change, a coalition of parties on the left, and pledged to give land to the landless and fight corruption.   

However, Lugo faced impeachment proceedings following a June 2012 incident in which police clashed with landless peasants, resulting in 17 deaths, and he was removed from office by a Paraguayan Congress controlled by his political enemies.

Lugo maintained that his presidency was targeted because he tried to help the country’s poor majority. Paraguay's powerful elite, long accustomed to getting their way during 61 years of rule by the Colorado Party, had fought Lugo’s attempts to raise taxes on the country's major export, soybeans, and redistribute farmland to the poor majority.

The current president, Horacio Cartes, elected earlier this year, joined the Colorado Party in 2009 and said he wanted to counter the swing to the left in Latin American politics.

He’ll certainly face an uphill battle. In Chile, Michelle Bachelet, a Socialist who had ruled the country between 2006 and 2010, decisively beat rival candidate Evelyn Matthei to retake the office on Dec. 15.

After General Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup, Bachelet was arrested and tortured, before being allowed to leave the country in 1975. She finally returned to Chile in 1979 after four years in exile.

Now again president, she plans to push forward major social reforms and has vowed to raise corporate taxes to fund an education overhaul, expanding access to higher education, and to reduce the wealth gap.

Ethnicity and Politics in Guyana

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
What’s the answer to this trivia question: “Which Jewish woman other than Israel’s Golda Meir has ever governed a country?” It’s Guyana’s Janet Jagan.

 Janet Rosenberg Jagan was a Chicago-born socialist politician who from 1997 to 1999 was president of Guyana, a republic on the northern coast of South America whose 795,000 people are mostly the descendants of African slaves and South Asian indentured labourers. How then did this come about?

Guyana, the former British Guiana, gained its independence from Great Britain in 1966. Its national motto is “One People, One Nation, One Destiny.” Rarely has a slogan reflected reality less.

Guyana is one of only three entities on the continent which are not Spanish or Portuguese. To its east is Suriname, the former Dutch Guiana, and further east is French Guiana, still under French sovereignty. The three Guianas are, in ethnicity, language and orientation, more part of the Caribbean than mainland South America.

Indo-Guyanese (or East Indians) constitute about 43 per cent of Guyana’s total population, followed by Afro-Guyanese at 30 per cent. People of mixed heritage are at 16 per cent and Amerindians (native American tribes) make up nine per cent. Most Indo-Guyanese practice Hinduism or Islam, while Blacks are mainly Christian.

In such societies, ethnic divisions easily become the basis for political cleavages. Tensions periodically have boiled over between the two main groups, which back ethnically based political parties and vote along ethnic lines.

The People’s Progressive Party (PPP) has been largely pro-Indian since the mid-1950s, while the People’s National Congress (PNC) has been mainly Afro-Guyanese.

The PNC managed to gain power for much of the period since independence even though its Afro-Guyanese supporters were numerically inferior to the other large bloc, the East Indians. This was due to the fact that it managed to obtain support from the mixed population, which is culturally similar to the Afro-Guyanese, and from the Amerindians.

The PPP was formed in 1950 by Dr. Cheddi Jagan, an Indo-Guyanese, and his American-born wife Janet.  It was socialist and at first genuinely multi-ethnic. One of the founders of the new party was a London-trained Afro-Guyanese, Forbes Burnham.

The PPP would prove too radical for the British, who still governed the colony; they suspected it of links with Communists. In 1955, the PPP split, and Burnham and his faction created the mainly Black PNC. Both parties became vehicles for the rival ethnic groups. The pro-PPP Hindi slogan “apan jaht” (vote for your own kind) became true for the whole society.

Washington, too, worried that Jagan was too left-wing and in 1961 President John Kennedy ordered the CIA to covertly finance a campaign of labour unrest and sabotage that led to race riots.

As independence drew near, London drafted a new constitution with a proportional representation electoral system favourable to the PNC. In the last pre-independence election in1964, a PNC coalition took office, and Burnham became prime minster. It was this government that led the country to independence two years later.

Back then as an aspiring journalist, I remember meeting and interviewing Cheddi Jagan in the autumn of 1965 when I was a student at McGill University. He was visiting Montreal and spoke at the university trying to make the case that he had been railroaded out of office as London was preparing to grant British Guiana independence.

Rigged elections would follow one after another after independence, as Burnham and his cronies – now calling themselves “socialists -- remained in power, driving the economy into the ground. A new constitution became law in 1980 and Burnham declared himself executive president. When he died in 1985, Guyana was the poorest nation in the western hemisphere.

His successor Desmond Hoyte began to revive the economy by courting foreign capitalists and privatizing many nationalized industries. He also opened up the political system to genuine competition.

In the October 1992 elections, Cheddi Jagan’s People’s Progressive Party/Civic led a four-party coalition to victory against the ruling PNC. Despite his Marxist philosophy, Jagan promised to continue the free market economic reforms.

Jagan would serve as president until his death five years later. His wife Janet held the post until 1999, when she retired due to ill health; she died in 2009. The Jagans had married in Chicago in 1943, while Janet was a nursing student at Cook County Hospital, Cheddi a dental student at Northwestern University, and both already involved in radical politics.

Since 1992 the PPP/Civic has won five straight victories. Guyana’s current president, Donald Ramotar, an economist by training, has been in office since 2011, succeeding Bharrat Jagdeo. He has pledged to continue his predecessors’ policies, with their emphasis on improving social conditions and government services, especially in the fields of housing, education, health and energy security.

Guyana has experienced positive growth almost every year over the past decade. But it continues to suffer from widespread government corruption and the fragile protection of property rights under the weak rule of law.

The Frozen Conflict Between Moldova and Transnistria

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

When it comes to eastern Europe, most of the world’s attention these days has been focused on the quarrel within Ukraine between those who want the nation to join the European Union and those who desire closer ties with Russia. But it’s not the only problem in that part of the former Soviet Union.

Just to the west of Ukraine lies Transnistria, also known as the Trans-Dniester Republic and (officially) the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, an unrecognized state that broke away from the former Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union in 1990.

Today it retains its independence thanks largely to the military support provided by the Russian 14th Army, which has been stationed there since the 1950s, when the whole area was part of the USSR. Russia also provides Transnistria with financial assistance.

The tiny breakaway republic of 4,163 square kilometres consists of a narrow strip of land located east of the Dnieper River (hence the name), plus the city of Bender and its surrounding localities located on the western side. The country borders Ukraine to its east.

In total, Transnistria comprises more than 500,000 people, with Russian and Ukrainian Slavs making up 59 per cent of the population and Moldovan Romanians 32 per cent. The capital, Tiraspol, a city of 203,000, is almost three-quarters Russian and Ukrainian.

Moldova itself has a checkered history. It is a largely Romanian-speaking entity, historically known as Bessarabia, which was part of Romania after the First World War until occupied by the Soviets in 1940 and reconstituted as the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (Moldavian SSR).

However, when Moscow created the Moldavian SSR, it added the mainly Russian-speaking Dniester region, formerly an autonomous part of Ukraine, to Romanian Bessarabia – sowing the seeds of future ethnic trouble.

In the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, it was clear that Moldova had an identity problem and that the inhabitants, coming from an array of ethnic backgrounds, were a long way from being a cohesive and friendly family.

The mainly Russian and Ukrainian population in the Dniester region grew alarmed over growing Moldovan nationalism and even the potential reunification of Moldova with Romania. A 1989 law which made Moldovan an official language added to the tension. The law made it compulsory for everyone who worked in a position where they had to communicate with customers to speak both languages; Russian and Ukrainian speakers saw this as discriminatory.

Given all this, the Trans-Dniester Republic proclaimed its secession from the Moldavian SSR in September 1990. A year later, when the USSR ceased to exist altogether, the Moldovian SSR declared its own independence, as did Transistria.

After World War II, Transnistria had been heavily industrialised and though it accounted for only 17 per cent of the old Soviet republic’s population, it was responsible for 40 per cent of its GDP. So the newly independent state of Moldova, whose 3.6 million people are themselves quite poor, attempted to regain the Trans-Dniester Republic, resulting a in a short war between March and July 1992.

With aid and equipment from the 14th Army, which still retains a 1,200-strong Russian military contingent in Transnistria, the region held off the Moldovans. A cease-fire led to the creation of a three-party Joint Control Commission, consisting of Russia, Moldova, and Transnistria, which supervises a demilitarized security zone on both sides of the Dniester River. It has been a “frozen conflict” ever since.

In September 2006 Transistria’s citizenry voted overwhelmingly to confirm their independence and the country has created its own constitution, flag, national anthem, and coat of arms, as well as a military, police, postal system, and currency. But Transnistria remains a de facto state, unrecognized by sovereign members of the international community -- including even Russia itself.

Transnistria is plagued by corruption, organised crime and smuggling. It has been accused of conducting illegal arms sales and of money laundering.

However, it remains an electoral democracy. Indeed, the current president, Yevgeny Shevchuk, an ethnic Ukrainian, won the December 2011 election by beating the incumbent, Igor Smirnov, and the Kremlin-backed speaker of the parliament, Anatoliy Kaminski.

Moldova is also home to 160,000 Gagauz, a Turkic Christian people. In 1994 the Autonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauzia, in Moldova’s south, was established for them.  If Moldova decided to unite with Romania, Gagauzia would have the right of self-determination.

Moldova and Transnistria have engaged in talks in recent months, including a meeting between Moldovan Prime Minister Iurie Leanca and Shevchuk. Moldova announced that its parliament would consider removing travel restrictions on Transnistrians with Russian or Ukrainian passports.

Moldova last month signed a free trade pact and political association treaty with the European Union which offered the impoverished country’s 3.5 million citizens visa-free travel entry within the 28-nation bloc.

Russia has already shown its dissatisfaction by banning the import of Moldovan wine, Moldova’s major export, and it has delivered thinly veiled threats that Russia might stop supplying Moldova with natural gas.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited Moldova recently, and said that the Obama administration would sponsor a Moldovan trade mission so it could develop a market for its wine in the United States.

It is unlikely that war will be renewed because Russian President Vladimir Putin would actively support Transnistria, while the Moldovans could expect little military aid from the United States and NATO.

The Andean Nations of South America Have Large Native Populations

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Along the mountainous western spine of South America, in regions once mainly part of the Inca Empire, there are a number of countries with significant Amerindian populations who speak native languages. And it has given these nations a decidedly left-wing cast.

Quechua speakers make up a large part of the population of Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia.  The language spoken by some 10 million people in South America, it was the one used by the Incas. With some five million speakers in Paraguay, Bolivia, and elsewhere, Guarani is another major South American language.

A quarter of Ecuador’s population of 15.7 million is native, while another 65 per cent is mestizo, having mixed European and indigenous ancestry. Almost all of the indigenous population are Quechuas living in the valleys of the Sierra region.

Indigenous peoples in Peru make up about 45 per cent of the total population of 30 million, with most living in the Andes mountains. There are a large number of distinct ethnic groups, with about 3.5 million speaking Quechua. Mestizos account for another 37 per cent.

Amerindians are the majority ethnic group in Bolivia, accounting for 62 per cent of the population of 10.5 million. An additional 30 per cent is mestizo. Here too the predominant native language is Quecha. Along with Aymara, Guarani, and Spanish, it is an official language of Bolivia.

Paraguay was established in colonial times as a refuge for native peoples. In 1609 the Catholic Jesuit Order created the Jesuit Reductions in Paraguay, which lasted from 1609 until 1767, to prevent the exploitation of the Indian peoples. By 1732 there were 30 Guarani missions in the colony; however the Jesuits were expelled by the Spanish crown in 1767 and the missions rapidly declined.

Today, while only a small per cent of Paraguay’s population is fully indigenous, with most of them living in the remote Gran Chaco region, almost all of the country’s other 6.8 million citizens are partially of native heritage. Along with Spanish, Guarani is one of the official languages of Paraguay, spoken by the majority of the population.

These countries all now have organizations dedicated to protecting and promoting the rights of indigenous peoples.

The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), formed in 1986, has pursued social change using a wide range of tactics. In 2005, CONAIE participated in an uprising which ousted President Lucio Gutierrez, whom they accused of betraying native peoples on behalf of foreign corporations. The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon represents people in the Amazon region of the country.

The Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP), comprising 57 organizations, is the primary indigenous rights movement in Peru. The Movement in the Amazon for Tribal Subsistence and Economic Sustainability (MATSES), is another rights organization that is working for the cultural survival of indigenous people.

In 2009, opposition to oil development in the Amazon region, led by AIDESEP, led to months of civil disobedience, including the closing down of roads and rivers to traffic. The protestors feared the toll it would take on the environment. Intervention by the military resulted in dozens killed.

Then president Alan Garcia charged AIDESEP’s leader, Alberto Pizango, with sedition and called the organization part of an “international conspiracy” backed by Bolivia and Venezuela to destabilize his regime.

Bolivian social movements developed primarily due to the failure of the political party system. These movements emanated in conflicts against privatisation of vital resources such as gas and water, and they coalesced into a larger struggle for justice by adopting a radical reform agenda.

The Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia, founded in 1982, is now the representative umbrella organization of 34 native groups in the country. Since 1990 it has organized major marches demanding indigenous autonomy, territorial protection, more seats in the national legislature, and indigenous control over natural resources in their territories.

Paraguay has two main native groups, the Coordination of Indigenous Peoples of the Cuenca of Pilcomayo River, and the Native League for Autonomy, Justice, and Ethics. The indigenous communities, who live in poverty and face discrimination, have been chased from their lands as a result of deforestation for livestock and agriculture.

Some groups have turned to violence in reaction to the poverty and oppression suffered at the hands of dictators and economic oligarchies.

Peru, in particular, endured a decades-long insurrection by a Maoist guerrilla movement based mainly in the native-populated rural highlands, known as Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), which became notorious for its use of terror.

Formed in the 1970s in the impoverished region of Ayacucho by Abimael Guzman, its militants fought a vicious war against the ethnically Spanish-dominated regimes in Lima. By the time of Guzman’s capture in 1992, at least 70,000 people had died, and hundreds of thousands displaced.

A smaller group, the Cuban-inspired Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, was also active at the time. Named for the last indigenous leader of the Incas, it was led by Victor Campos and its stated goals were to establish a socialist and anti-imperialist state. In December 1996, fourteen of its members occupied the Japanese Ambassador's residence in Lima, holding 72 hostages for over four months until killed by the military.

In Paraguay, the Paraguayan People’s Army (EPP) is a Marxist rebel group that has recently stepped up attacks in areas where the guerrillas are thought to draw support from impoverished farmers chafing at the expansion of large-scale soybean farms and cattle ranches. The group, which adopted its current name in 2008, proposes the destruction of “imperial-bourgeois democracy.”

It’s an uphill road, but Amerindian peoples are making progress. Bolivia and Peru have even in recent years elected presidents of indigenous heritage.

Mandela's South Africa and the Middle East

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

As the world mourns the death of a truly great man, Nelson Mandela, it is interesting to look back on his, and South Africa’s, relationship with Israel and the Arab world.

A disproportionate number of white South Africans who opposed apartheid and aided the African National Congress during the years of white-minority rule were Jewish, and Nelson Mandela always made sure the world knew it.

In his 1994 autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom,” Mandela said “I have found Jews to be more broad-minded than most whites on issues of race and politics, perhaps because they themselves have historically been victims of prejudice.”

But he also sometimes viewed Israel as a colonial power, and Jewish groups criticized Mandela for praising the Palestine Liberation Organization just a month after he was freed in 1990. The PLO had built a close relationship with the ANC and for some years had helped train members of its military wing. One of Mandela’s first acts as a free man was to visit Yasser Arafat.

After all, following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, an increasingly isolated Israel developed close ties with the apartheid regime in Pretoria. By the mid-1970s, an economic and military alliance between Israel and South Africa was on the ascendancy.

In April 1976 South African Prime Minister John Vorster paid a state visit, meeting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The two countries even cooperated in the development of nuclear technology. By the late 1980s Israel was virtually alone among countries that still maintained strong, even strategic relations with apartheid South Africa. Obviously, it would have been asking too much of even a Nelson Mandela to ignore all this.

Libya had also provided funding and support, as well as military training, to the ANC. Mandela, in turn, said he considered Moammar Gadhafi a friend and made two official visits to the country as president of South Africa, in 1994 and 1997.

Mandela chided those who expressed opposition to these ties by declaring that they made the mistake of assuming that “their enemies should be our enemies.”

However in October 1999, after he had stepped down as president, Mandela came to Israel, visited  theYad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum, and met with newly elected prime minister Ehud Barak. But he reiterated his unwavering opposition to Israeli control of Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and southern Lebanon.

In recent years, under presidents Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s relationship with Israel has been decidedly cool, as Pretoria sees itself as sharing an affinity with the Palestinians and other Third World peoples. Just last month, South Africa’s Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane said that South African ministers are not visiting Israel out of solidarity with the Palestinians.

“The struggle of the people of Palestine is our struggle," she told an audience of trade unionists.

“The last time I saw a map of Palestine, I couldn’t sleep,” Nkoana-Mashabane added, explaining that the map “is just dots, smaller than those of the homelands, and that broke my heart.” The “homelands,” also called Bantustans, were territories set aside for Black South Africans in apartheid-era South Africa.

Iran’s nuclear quest, however, did not bother her when she met with Iran’s visiting Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and praised Iran for its “for human rights."

None of this bodes well as the country faces a future without the stabilizing inspiration of Nelson Mandela.

For the Past 35 Years, Iran Has Been the World's Major Problem

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

As the year draws to a close, the greater Middle East, that immense region from Morocco in the west to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the east, remains to most volatile part of the world. And American presidents have for the past 35 years seemingly been clueless about the region.

In 1979, Jimmy Carter, inept and indecisive, abandoned the Shah of Iran and allowed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to outfox and run circles around him. His botched attempt to rescue the American embassy hostages only magnified his failures. Those who want to get a fuller account of how this transpired should watch the first installment of an excellent three part BBC documentary on Iran and the West, “The Man Who Changed the World,” available on You Tube.

This regime change ushered in a new zeitgeist in the world, and especially in the Middle East. By 1982 the Islamic Republic was sowing terror around the region and elsewhere, including the killing of 241 U.S. Marines in Beirut by its protégé Hezbollah in 1983. It has gone from strength to strength.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan supported the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the decaying Soviet empire, because in his tunnel vision “religion” was “good,” Communism “bad.” Of course the Islamist fighters later morphed into the Taliban and America is still paying the price.

Bill Clinton was, let us say, “busy” as al-Qaeda bombed two American embassies in east Africa in 1998, killed 19 U.S. servicemen in Khobar, Saudi Arabia in 1996, and destroyed the USS Cole in Aden in 2000. By the time he left office, al-Qaeda was no doubt planning the attacks of 9/11.

George Bush fought the Taliban in Afghanistan and Baathist Iraq “on the cheap,” and knowing nothing about the culture of either country, declared them both safe for democracy after American forces “beat” Saddam and Mullah Omar.

Actually, both wars had barely begun. The real victor in the Iraq war when the Americans finally left  was actually Iran, as the Baghdad Shi’a regime of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki now is little more than an Iranian vassal.

As for Afghanistan, the Pashtun Khan Hamid Harzai, chief of the Popalzai tribe – known to us as the “president of Afghanistan” -- is negotiating with fellow Pashtuns in the Taliban, who are mostly from the rival Ghilzai tribe, in order to save his own neck once western forces depart the country. Already there are sources claiming that he will reintroduce stoning as a punishment for adultery in the country’s penal code. How long before the Taliban regains control over large parts of the country?

Barack Obama has been giving away the store entirely. He looked away when Iranians protested in 2009 against a fixed election; only reluctantly got involved in the uprising against Moammar Gadhafi in Libya in 2011, and did nothing when Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons in Syria earlier this year.

Obama has now declared a great diplomatic victory in the attempt to prevent the Iranians from developing a nuclear bomb. The “Plan of Action” signed by Iran, the United States, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and the European Union declares that Tehran can no longer enrich uranium to 20 per cent and must neutralize its existing stockpiles of 20 per cent enriched uranium. It also cannot increase its stockpiles of 3.5 per cent enriched uranium.

The sanctions relief, some $7 billion, is relatively limited and theoretically reversible if the Iranians break their promises. All the main sanctions will stay in place until a final agreement has been signed -- if it will be -- six months from now.

But can Iran be trusted? Its record is far from reassuring. Its leadership has not given up on wanting to wipe out what its leaders have called the “cancerous Zionist entity,” Israel. Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini recently remarked that “Zionist officials cannot be called humans, they are like animals, some of them.” The Israeli regime “is doomed to failure and annihilation,” he added.

In any case, hard-liners in Iran think Tehran has already made too many concessions and think all sanctions should be lifted. And Khameini is himself leaving his options open and can always ask them to step in if he doesn’t like the way the talks develop.

We seem to have come full circle from 1979– once again Iran is the major problem, as it has been for the last six U.S. presidents.

Burma's Ethnic, Religious Divisions Make Democracy Difficult

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Burma, or Myanmar – the country is known by both names – has for decades been one of the most oppressive states in Asia, under military rule between 1962 and 2010. Part of the reason stems from its many ethnic divisions, which has made it difficult to establish democracy in this southeast Asian nation.

Burma consists of seven regions populated chiefly by the Burmans, or Bamar, who make up two-thirds of the population of 60 million; and seven states inhabited mainly by indigenous ethnic minorities, including the Shan, Kayah, Mon, Kayin, Rakhine, Chin and Kachin.

When the Shan, Chin and Kachin minorities accepted a semi-federal constitutional framework in 1947, as Burma was about to emerge from British colonial rule, the Bamar majority guaranteed them autonomy. But the other minorities were not invited, and Kayin observers rejected the outcome.

Following the failure of these accords, the ethnic policy of the Bamar-dominated central government has alternated between dialogue and violent counter-insurgency. Hostility to the government’s Burmanization policies contributed to this alienation on the part of the minorities. 

Since coming to power, following the country’s first elections after decades of military rule in 2010, President Thein Sein has said that peace with minority groups is a priority, and the government has signed individual cease-fires with many ethnic armed groups. It has also freed more than 1,100 political prisoners since the reforms began.

But leaders of ethnic minorities remain wary, pointing to the military’s continuing campaigns against ethnic armies in Kachin, Shan and other states. Fighting between the Kachin Independence Army and government forces since June 2011 has displaced more than 100,000 Kachins, with many seeking refuge in Yunnan Province, in neighbouring China.

Even Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and a revered advocate of democratic government, who was released from years of house arrest in 2010, has been less than forthcoming when it comes to the rights of ethnic minorities.

 “The ethnic nationalities want to set up a federal system,” David Tarkapaw of the United Nationalities Federal Council, an umbrella organization representing 11 ethnic armed groups, asserted recently, and this will require “agreement on some basic changes to the constitution” that came into force in 2008.

Meanwhile, another serious issue has come to the fore, involving the country’s small Muslim minority, who consist of somewhere between four and eight per cent of the population.

This is a legacy of the colonial past, when Burma was part of the British Indian Empire. Indians, many of them Muslims, came as civil servants and soldiers, stirring resentment among Burmese Buddhists. In recent months radical monks have built on those historic grievances, stating that Muslims are having more children than Buddhists and could dilute the country’s Buddhist character.

In recent months, Buddhist mobs have killed more than 200 Muslims and forced more than 150,000 people from their homes. In March, a three-day rampage through Muslim neighborhoods in the central city of Meikhtila left 43 people dead. In August, a mob in the city attacked Tomas Ojea Quintana, the United Nations’ special human rights rapporteur in Burma.

In Lashio, a city in the northern Shan state, mobs set fire to a Muslim school and orphanage in May.

A growing Buddhist movement known as “969” is campaigning for a boycott of Muslim products and businesses and a ban on interfaith marriages. “If we are weak,” Ashin Wirathu, the spiritual leader of the radical movement has declared, “our land will become Muslim.”

The suggestion that Muslims leave the country has been a common refrain during the violence, which bewilders many Muslims who have always considered themselves Burmese.

There is particular disdain for a group of about one million stateless Muslims, who call themselves Rohingya, some of whom migrated from neighbouring Bangladesh. The local authorities in the western state of Rakhine, where most live, have imposed a two-child limit for Muslim Rohingya families, a policy that does not apply to Buddhists. Human Rights Watch has accused the authorities of fomenting an organized campaign of “ethnic cleansing” against the Rohingya.

This has also tarnished the image of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, head of the National League for Democracy (NLD), who has been criticized for failing to speak out strongly in defense of these stigmatized Muslims.

Asked at a news conference in 2012 whether the Rohingya should be given citizenship, she equivocated. “We have to be very clear about what the laws of citizenship are and who are entitled to them,” she responded.

Clearly, if Burma is to successfully continue its transition to democracy – at the moment, the military still has a major say in government -- critical problems of ethnic discord remain to be properly managed and resolved. And the NLD needs to realize that ethnic relations must be accorded a full place alongside democratization.