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.

Identity Politics in Nepal

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

In the Himalayan state of Nepal, identity issues have dominated its political landscapes in the past decade.

There are more than 125 ethnic communities in Nepal, and the majority of people are also peasants.

The dominance of Hindu groups began after the unification of various principalities into modern-day Nepal by the Gorkha King Prithvi Narayan Shah in the 1770s, establishing a Hindu dynasty in Nepal.

However, Nepal witnessed a series of peasant rebellions against the state and landed aristocrats in the 20^th century, culminating in a full-fledged Maoist revolution which overthrew the old order.

Ethnic peasants were at the forefront, demanding autonomy, dignity, and an end to state violence. Since then, however, the idea of indigeneity has become more pronounced. 

As identity politics became the dominant ideological force, this has undermined the course of radical political developments in the country.

People who do not fall within the Hindu caste hierarchy and have their own language and cultural identity claim themselves to be ethnic populations. 

Madhesi communities in the southern Terai area, which borders India, and who constitute one third of Nepal’s population, consider themselves as a separate ethnic group.

The Maoists entered into a peace agreement in 2006 and two years later won the first elections of the post-war period. They declared Nepal a republic. 

However, in the aftermath of the revolution the powerful ethnic and peasant movements were gradually replaced by identity politics as a new consolidating force in Nepali politics. 

Dozens of political groups emerged demanding political autonomy for indigenous people and identity-based federalism in Nepal. Taking advantage of this, urban and ethnic elites, have reconsolidated their political and economic power.

The Maoists had effectively mobilized the idea of ethnic autonomy to enroll the rural peasantry into the revolution, not realizing this might eventually boomerang and reproduce, via new forms of identity-based political mobilization, a return to upper class dominance.

By prioritizing ethnic autonomy, the Maoists had created an opening for identity politics to displace core concerns regarding social, cultural, and economic exploitation.

As identity politics surpassed other political ideas, the Maoists themselves were left with ethnic federalism as the only agenda for their political campaign. 

Ethnic identity politics became particularly strong in the Terai region, where the Madhesi people faced the most entrenched economic inequality and caste discrimination in the country. They have long been exposed to racial slurs and to being framed as Indians or illegal migrants.

They had come to champion a Madhesi state within a proposed new constitution. But the Maoists, voted out of power in elections held in 2013, were forced to accept a new constitution, passed in 2015, which created a geography-based federation, dividing Nepal into seven provinces.

Madhesi activists argued that it separated them into different jurisdictions, increasing rather than alleviating their discrimination. 

So while many Nepalese celebrated Constitution Day this past Sept. 20, Mahanta Thakur, leader of the Madhesi-based Rastriya Janata Party Nepal, told protesters that the Madhesi people “have been fighting against oppression, injustice and discrimination for a long time.” That is why “we consider this day a black day.” 

The Nepalese situation is another demonstration of the law of unintended consequences, as the Maoists learned the hard way.

An Obscure Part of South Asia

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

There are places in the world so relatively obscure that few people other than those who live there are aware they exist, but that doesn’t make them any less important.

The Chittagong Hill Tracts in the far southeastern corner of Bangladesh is one such region.

It has a diverse population, quite different from the rest of Bangladesh, which is almost uniformly Bengali Muslim. Its inclusion in the Muslim state called Pakistan that was born at the 1947 partition of India has also led to problems for its peoples, who are mostly Buddhists and Hindus.

Covering 13,295 square kilometres, the Hill Tracts are the only extensively hilly area in Bangladesh. It shares borders with Myanmar on the south and southeast, India on the north and northeast, and the Chittagong district of Bangladesh on the west.

Home to eleven indigenous ethnic groups, the largest being the Chakma, they are collectively known as the Jumma people.

They historically have lived a relatively semi-autonomous existence under first Mughal and then later British imperialism. They were governed by semi-autonomous local chieftains or minor “princes” as British administrators dubbed them.

At the time of partition in 1947, the inhabitants of the Hill Tracts opted to join secular India rather than Muslim-majority Pakistan but, for complex reasons, ended up in the latter.

This population, numbering some 500,000, is different from the majority Bengali people of Bangladesh in language, culture, heritage, religion, political history, and economy.

They are closer to their Southeast Asian neighbours in Burma, Vietnam and Cambodia and speak Tibeto-Burmese dialects rather than Bengali.

Such ethnic and religious differences have been a source of conflict in the region. The peoples of the Hill Tracts have suffered violence and human rights violations, including the destruction of Buddhist and Hindu temples, forced conversion to Islam, rape and massacre.

Many peoples in the area have objected to the influx of Muslim Bengali settlers. While in 1961 there were 40 mosques and two madrasas in the region, by 1981, there were 592 mosques and 35 madrasas.

Widespread resentment also occurred over the displacement of some 100,000 of the native peoples due to the construction of the Kaptai Dam in 1962. It inundated nearly 40 per cent of their cultivatable land.

They did not receive compensation from the government and many thousands fled to India.

The 1972 Constitution of Bangladesh required “Bengaliness” to be the prime identity for its citizens, effectively sidelining minority indigenous groups like the Chakmas. Chakma leader Manabendra Narayan Larma refused to be identified with the Bangladeshi nation.

An armed struggle between the Shanti Bahini insurgents made up mostly of Chakmas, and the government only ended in 1997 with the signing of the Chittagong Hills Tract Peace Accord.

It provided recognition of the region as a tribal-inhabited area, introducing a special governance system. This was regarded as the cornerstone of a new period of peaceful coexistence between the inhabitants of the Chittagong Hills Tracts and Bangladesh.

But the lack of implementation of the main provisions in the accord has led to an increase in tensions between the central government and the indigenous communities. These derive in particular from the presence of the Bangladesh military in the region.

Hezbollah is Losing Grip on Lebanon

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

More than a million of Lebanon’s five million citizens recently came out into the streets to express their anger at a fossilized political class that has run the country into the ground.

Since Oct. 17, protests across Lebanon have challenged the political status quo, in a country which has always been run by the country’s ruling sectarian-based oligarchy. It was ignited by a government plan to tax WhatsApp calls. 

The mass demonstrations have brought the country to a halt, closing schools and banks, and blocking roads and highways.

To make things worse, Prime Minister Saad Hariri on Oct. 29 ended up resigning, though still governing as a caretaker.

The country’s political system is constitutionally divided along sectarian lines to ensure the inclusion of Lebanon’s 18 recognized ethnic and religious communities.

As a result, Lebanon’s various religious groups established their own parties and patronage networks, creating a widespread system of corruption and nepotism.

Protesters want a government of non-partisan experts to lead Lebanon out of its deepening economic and financial crisis, secure basic services such as water and electricity, and create a new, non-sectarian electoral law. 

The Shiite group Hezbollah, which is both a political party and an armed militia, is a power broker in the country and enmeshed in its governing institutions.

But if it fails to adapt to the new situation it could potentially risk the environment that has allowed the group three decades to confront Israel and expand its regional activities. 

The fact that protests are occurring in even traditional Hezbollah strongholds such as the Bekaa Valley and South Lebanon should be a cause for alarm for the group.

Hezbollah in 2016, with the tacit approval of Iran and the United States, secured a deal that brought General Michel Aoun, a Maronite Christian, to the presidency; Hariri, a Sunni Muslim, to the premiership; and made Nabih Berri, a Druze, parliamentary speaker.

In return, it agreed not to hinder the ability of Aoun and Hariri and to lead the government.

Is this agreement now coming undone? Though this is hardly the first time Lebanon has been convulsed by civil conflicts, what’s different is that the current grassroots uprising of younger people is not sectarian. Shia, Sunni, Christian and Druze appear to be coming together.

They have been flying Lebanese flags, rather than those of sects and parties. And they have been targeting those they regard as corrupt within their own communities.

Both Maronite Christian Patriarch Bechara Boutros Al-Rai and Sunni Muslim Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Latif Derianhas, have called for a change in government to include qualified technocrats.

“The country's situation cannot withstand another day of delays,” Al-Rai stated.

Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, the odd man out, may be losing control of a significant part of the Shiite constituency as these protests continue.

Nasrallah has asked supporters to stay off the streets and suggested that the turmoil was instigated by foreign countries.

Still, while his Shiite supporters may not approve of his dealings within the Lebanese political system, they remain supportive of “the resistance project” against Israel.

Meanwhile, Lebanese leaders have yet to make progress on the formation of a new cabinet, and the crisis deepens.