Chile's Troubles Following Long History of Turmoil

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

 

The South American nation of Chile has been the scene of violent anti-government protests for more than two months. At least 26 people have been killed and thousands more injured. 

The government estimates arson, looting and property destruction have caused three billion dollars in damages.

They began Oct. 18 in the capital of Santiago, when students opposing a hike in the price of subway fares engaged in vandalism and violence, prompting the authorities to enact a state of emergency and curfew. 

As the demonstrations grew larger, a Santiago university was set ablaze and a church was looted, with religious iconography burned in the street.

Walmart saw more than 120 of its supermarkets looted or burned during the recent rioting.

An estimated one million people clogged the streets of the Chilean capital by Oct. 26. In the port city of Valparaiso, the National Congress was evacuated as protesters clashed with police.

But the vehemence of the protests should have come as no surprise. Chile has failed to find an adequate response to the grave economic and social inequality that has created the most severe unrest since the country returned to democracy some three decades ago.

During Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship the foundations were laid for a neoliberal economy. The education, pension and health systems, as well as the electricity and water supply, were largely privatized.

The top one per cent of Chile’s population now earns 33 per cent of the country’s wealth. Protesters are angry over low wages and a thin social safety net.

President Sebastian Pinera at first reacted by condemning the protesters. He sent about 10,000 soldiers out onto the streets in armored vehicles. No government has taken such measures since the end of Pinochet’s regime in 1990.

Pinera later sought to quell the unrest by promising to enact higher taxes for the rich and a series of wealth redistribution policies. But his announced pension increases and a subsidy that would top up the monthly minimum wage from $396 to $460 fall far short of union and social movement proposals.

Pinera has been in office since 2018 but served an earlier term as president from 2010 to 2014. He has an estimated net wealth of $2.8 billion, making him one of the richest people in Chile.

Some 1,600 people remain in pre-trial detention out of 28,000 detained since mid-October. People are increasingly labeling the Chilean government’s actions during the state of emergency as unconstitutional.

Human Rights Watch on Nov. 26 accused Chilean police of perpetrating “serious human rights violations” during the protests and demanded reforms of Chile’s national police force.

The UN Human Rights Office, which is headed by former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, a political opponent of Pinera, on Dec. 13 concurred.

Meanwhile, the United Nation’s COP25 Climate Summit, originally scheduled for Santiago Dec. 2-13, was moved to Madrid.

As Chile again endures turbulent times, it pays to reread Colombian novelist and Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s essay “Why Allende Had To Die,” published in the British magazine New Statesman in 1974. It dealt with arguably the worst period in the country’s history. 

The article described socialist Salvador Allende’s triumph in the presidential election of Sept. 4, 1970, and the bloody military coup that followed three years later.

Allende’s Popular Unity government was overthrown and he was killed in the presidential palace on Sept. 11, 1973. A junta under Pinochet was established, with tens of thousands of people interned and tortured, and more than 3,000 executed. 

Pinochet remained Chile’s ruler for 17 years. He died in 2006, without having been convicted of the crimes of which he was accused.

The current unrest has already had one beneficial outcome: Chile’s Congress on Dec. 19 gave the green light to a referendum for April 26, 2020 on changing the country’s constitution to replace the Pinochet-era one.

The present constitution does not establish the state’s responsibility to provide healthcare and education, which are two main demands from the protesters.

“This agreement is a first step, but it is a historic and fundamental first step to start building our new social pact, and in this the citizenry will have a leading role,” declared the country’s interior minister, Gonzalo Blumel. If things continue on the current path, the movement may get much of what it demands.

A Dravidian Nation in South India?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] 

The world’s attention regarding Tamils has centred on the failed attempt by the Tamil Tigers on the island of Sri Lanka to create a separate Tamil Eelam in the north, across the Palk Strait from India.

But the 70 million Tamils in the mainland state of Tamil Nadu in India have also harbored separatist dreams over the years.

Most Tamils are Hindus, but because of their history and culture, they practice forms of Hinduism and its rituals different from other parts of the country and resent the northern versions.

Though a tiny minority, upper-caste Brahmins in what was then Madras Province in British India dominated the administrative services and the newly created urban professions in the 19th and early 20th century. This led to discontent amongst the lower castes.

Anti-Brahminism became organized in the formation of the Justice Party in late 1916. It represented the non-Brahmins in Madras and was the start of the so-called Dravidian Movement in India’s southern regions.

It championed ending the domination of Hindi-speaking northern India, with its Sanscritized Brahmin-dominated Hindu culture, over the politics and economy of the south Indian province.

Members were urged to boycott the use of Brahmin priests in ceremonies, who, they claimed, used religion to exploit the Tamil masses.

The Tamil Dravidian Movement also opposed the imposition of Hindi as a national language in the south of the country.

On July 13, 1947, a month before India became independent, Tamil separatists passed a resolution demanding an independent nation.

Most Dravidian parties today, including the Dravidian Progress Federation (DMK) and the All India Anna Dravidian Progressive Party (AIADMK) are offshoots of the Justice Party, later renamed the Dravidian Conference (DK).

Modern-day Tamil Nadu was formed in 1956 after the reorganization of India’s states on linguistic lines. By granting nationalists a Tamil state, with Tamil its official language, the Indian government took much of the separatist steam out of the Dravidian movement.

Even so, during the 1950s and the 1960s, arguing that Tamils were a distinct people, Tamil leaders demanded, at the very least, greater power and control over their own affairs from New Delhi. The DMK, the more separatist of the two parties, still wanted a sovereign country.

After winning control of the state in the 1967 election, the DMK demanded autonomy in which the national government would control only defence, foreign affairs, inter-state communication and currency.

Some Tamil separatists were suspected of being involved in the 1991 assassination of Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi by the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers, arising from his sending the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) to Sri Lanka.

At its most recent general council meeting, the DMK demanded adequate powers for the state government on subjects such as finance, education, subsidies and loans, and an end to the “big brother attitude” of the Centre.

Though the state is governed today by the AIADMK, in the 2019 Indian federal election the DMK won 24 of Tamil Nadu’s 39 seats, while the AIADMK, allied with the governing Bharatiya Janata Party, took just one.

The BJP itself, viewed as an upper-caste party, won no seats. Tamils remain wary of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who espouses an all-Indian nationalism.

Ocean Islands on the Verge of Climate Catastrophe

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

The small Indian Ocean nation of the Maldives, southwest of India and Sri Lanka, is an archipelago with about 516,000 inhabitants. Today, it is on the front lines of dealing with climate change.

The chain is 860 kilometres long and the width varies between 80 to 120 kilometres. There are 1,190 small tropical islands out of which 358 are being currently utilized for human settlements, infrastructure and economic activities.

The highest point in the Maldives is just 1.8 metres above sea level – half the total land area is less than one metre above water. As seas rise they threaten to make the country uninhabitable within perhaps three or four decades.

Rising sea levels also threaten scarce fresh-water resources. Salt water intrusion is gradually encroaching in to the islands’ small pockets of fresh water underground.

The coral reefs surrounding the Maldives are at risk due to gradual warming of sea water. Given that these reefs support both the country’s tourism and fisheries, climate change is a profound threat to its very economic base. 

One proposal, in fact, is to consolidate the population onto 10-15 islands. People living on the smaller lower-lying islands would be relocated to more flood-resistant islands when needed.

One of those is the City of Hope being built on an artificial island called Hulhumalé, near the capital Malé. Once complete, it will accommodate 240,000 people. It is being fortified with walls three metres above sea level.

The Maldives were devastated by the Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004. Only nine islands escaped any flooding, while 57 others faced serious damage to critical infrastructure.

Fourteen islands had to be totally evacuated, and six were destroyed. A further 21 resort islands were forced to close because of serious devastation. The total damage was estimated at more than $400 million.

The country has also seen considerable political unrest in recent times. A British protectorate after 1887, it attained independence in 1965. Until 1968, the Maldives had been a Muslim sultanate except for a period under the Portuguese in the 16^th century. Their attempts to impose Christianity provoked a local revolt and they were evicted after 15 years.

Islam had been introduced in the 12th century and the country’s current constitution, promulgated in 2008, stipulates that Islam is the state religion.

From 1978 to 2008, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom was the president. In 2005, under political pressure, he allowed the formation of political parties and, in 2008, following the country’s first multi-party presidential elections, Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) was elected.

However, public protests against Nasheed led to his resignation in 2012, with Vice President Mohammed Waheed Hassan Manik taking over. Nasheed stated that he was forced out of office at gunpoint.

Nasheed contested the 2013 election and won the most votes in the first round. But the Supreme Court cited irregularities and annulled it. In the end, Abdulla Yameen, the candidate of the Progressive Party of the Maldives and half-brother of former president Gayoom, assumed the presidency.

Yameen, who employed religion as a tool of identity politics, lost power to Ibrahim Mohamed Solih of the MDP. Elected in 2018, Solih is close to Nasheed. The party also won a parliamentary election in April, while Yameen has been sentenced to five years in prison for money laundering.

In 2008 former president Mohamed Nasheed had suggested that the country might be forced to purchase land elsewhere, so that the population could relocate should sea level rise make the islands uninhabitable. This idea, though, is no longer being pursued.

A year later, to publicize the impact of climate change, Nasheed and 11 ministers, all sporting scuba diving equipment, held an underwater cabinet meeting. 

Nasheed went on to pledge to make the country carbon neutral by 2020 and received $6.5 million from the European Union to assist in meeting this goal.

“Climate change is a national security issue for us. It is an existential threat,” he declared recently.

The Maldives played a role at the UN Climate Action Summit held this past September. The country stated it will work towards greener transport, investments in green tourism practices, and climate proofing of all future infrastructure investments. But will this prove enough?

Rwandan Genocide’s Forgotten Victims

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

In the undergraduate course I teach on ethnic nationalism, a student recently gave a presentation on the horrific Rwandan genocide of 1994.

It was organized by members of the Hutu political elite, at the top levels of the national government. More than 800,000 people, mostly from the minority Tutsi community, were murdered while the world stood by.

But few people know that another small ethnic group in the country was also caught up in the carnage.

The Twa can be considered the forgotten victims of the Rwandan war and genocide; their suffering has gone largely unrecognised.

They number just one per cent of the country’s people and claim to be the original inhabitants of Rwanda.

Despite their limited numbers, there was a widespread Hutu perception that the Twa were sympathetic to Tutsis, reinforced by the involvement of some Twa in neighbouring Burundi with the Tutsi in that country. 

About 10,000 people, more than a third of the Twa population of Rwanda, were killed and a similar number fled the country as refugees.

Rwanda’s post-genocide constitution rejects ethnic classifications; it commits itself to “fighting the ideology of genocide.” It aims for “the eradication of ethnic, regional and other divisions and promotion of national unity.”

In 2004 the Rwandan Justice Ministry refused to grant legal status to the Twa-rights NGO Communauté des Autochtones Rwandaises (CAURWA, Community of Indigenous People of Rwanda) unless it stopped identifying the Twa as Rwanda’s first inhabitants.

Because ethnic terminology is banned in Rwanda, the Twa are officially referred to as historically marginalized people. They are without a name.

Following the genocide, there was discrimination against Twa survivors in the distribution of food and other supplies. They were also not recognized in post-conflict reparations frameworks in Rwanda.

The government of Rwanda cut off assistance to the Twa if they continued to consider themselves a distinct people. 

Rwanda established a fund in 1998 for genocide survivors. “When we tried to get money from the fund for survivors, we were told that our families must have been killed by accident because the genocide only targeted the Tutsi,” said Shaban Munyarukundo, a member of a Twa advocacy group. 

Social and economic integration of Twa in Rwandan society is extremely limited; they remain disadvantaged in education, healthcare, and land rights.

Twa communities have higher infant mortality rates, shorter average lifespans and higher rates of disease and malnutrition than their Hutu and Tutsi neighbours.

Activists say that more than 90 per cent of the community is now landless. Even though Rwanda’s economy is one of Africa’s fastest-growing, most Twa live in abject poverty.

In 2017 the UN Committee for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women expressed concern at ongoing marginalization of and discrimination against Twa women.

The Twa were killed in even greater proportion than the Tutsi during the genocide yet cannot commemorate their dead because they fear being arrested for “ethnic divisionism.” 

“All that was left of the Twa after the genocide were orphans and old ladies,” remarked Jerome Lewis, co-director of the Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability at University College London. 

“In proportion, they suffered more than any other group, and yet there’s not a single memorial.”