Bolivian Indians walk from El Alto to La Paz during a protest march against the government, May 30. (Reuters File Photo)

When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the mid-16th century on the immense plains of the bleak plateau that forms the westerly part of what is now Bolivia, they paused for a while at a settlement not far from the rim of a great canyon. At 12,000ft they found it too cold, and they made their permanent base in the relative shelter of the slopes below and founded the city of La Paz.
The village of El Alto on the high plateau, which 30 years ago was home only to the capital’s international airport, has now become a huge metropolis of nearly a million Indians, driven there over the past 20 years by the irresistible force of neoliberal economics. The prevailing economic system, devised by US economists in the 1980s, succeeded in destroying the country’s agricultural system and its embryonic industries, and closing down the state-owned tin mines- -once the source of the wealth of Spain. This predictable disaster brought hundreds of thousands of workless but highly politicised families to live at the gates of the capital city, from where they have been able to hold it to ransom at will. Others migrated to the lower regions of the country, to the Chapare, to grow the profitable crop of coca leaf, the base of cocaine.
Only one road connects La Paz with the outside world, and it has been controlled since the middle of May by the irate Indians of El Alto. Every capital city in Latin America is much the same: a tiny enclave of unbelievable privilege surrounded by a gigantic swamp of poverty. But nowhere is this clash of cultures so vivid, so dramatic and so desperate as between the wealthy canyon of La Paz, home to the heirs of the original white settlers, and the freezing high plateau of El Alto, housing the breeze-block shanties of the expropriated indigenous population.
The demands of the Indians have been uncompromisingly radical. They make no mention of work or food, education or health. They have only two specific requests: a new constitution that would recognise the part that they should play in the government of the country (in which they form more than 60% of the population of 8 million), and the return to the hands of the state of the country’s reserves of oil and gas.
Oil was nationalised in Bolivia first in 1937, a year before the Mexican wells were expropriated that were once Lord Cowdray’s, and again in 1970. The shell of the state company, YPFB, still exists, and most Bolivians remain implacably hostile to foreign ownership, but private oil companies have kept coming back. When immense reserves of natural gas were discovered in the 1990s, some 50 trillion cubic feet at the last estimate, Bolivia became ever more attractive to external predators, its reserves second only to those of Venezuela.
The government and the companies (British Gas and Spain’s Repsol among them) were keen to get the gas out of the ground and down to the coast, to be shipped off to California. Others, notably the spokesmen for the Indian majority, thought that the gas might be better used to fuel Bolivia’s own industrial development. The government’s attempts to secure the export of the gas through Chile, Bolivia’s traditional enemy (ever since, in the 1880s, the Chileans seized the territory through which the gas pipeline would have run), ended in October 2003 when violent protests in El Alto led to the overthrow of President Sanchez de Losada, Bolivia’s last elected president. This week’s events have been an almost exact replay, with the resignation of the stop-gap president, Carlos Mesa, after prolonged Indian demonstrations and roadblocks had made the country ungovernable by his regime. Something new was required.
The chief emerging protagonist in the next stage of Bolivia’s drama is Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian from the high plateau who became the organiser of the coca growers in the Chapare, in the headwaters of the Amazon. From this base of desperate landless peasants and politicised former tin miners, he has become a national figure, allying the socialist rhetoric of the traditional Bolivian left with the fresh language of the indigenous population, now mobilised and angry.
A man in his 40s, a leftist of great charm and charisma, Morales leads the Movement Towards Socialism, and is an outspoken supporter of Castro’s Cuba.
If Morales eventually emerges as Bolivia’s elected president, the entire relation of forces in the countries of the Andes will be changed, since comparable indigenous movements in neighbouring countries are also demanding their proper share of power. Yet there have been many false dawns. Observing events in Bolivia, an experienced Brazilian has suggested, is like “watching the train of history pass by on many occasions without the Indians ever securing a ticket to ride“. Not since the end of the 18th century has such a seismic upheaval occurred among the continent’s indigenous peoples. This time things may be different.
Richard Gott
GUARDIAN.CO.UK

A major “shakeup“ took place recently within the ultra-conservative Islamic Party of Malaysia (PAS), when a host of liberals were voted into top posts, including that of deputy president.
The Malaysian political scene has become synonymous with stagnation. And so any whiff of progressive alterations to its landscape is often considered noteworthy, if not by the long-ruling United Malays National Organization (UMNO), then by just about everyone else--the opposition, activists, scholars, independent news commentators and the rakyat (citizens).
Such interpretation, however, is usually predicated more on hope than substance. This was the case when Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi, promising reform, took over from long-ruling strongman Mahathir Mohamad in late 2003, and when less than a year later the courts freed Anwar, Malaysia’s most famous prisoner. The putative reformist has yet to inject much life into the foundering opposition.
What, then, is the substance behind the shakeup that took place last Sunday?
Clearly, PAS wants to reinvent itself. It has little choice; its survival depends on reinvention. The party learned a hard lesson when it was crushed by the UMNO-led National Front coalition in parliamentary elections last year. There have been rumblings among PAS’s top brass to reform ever since. The party election results are the biggest step yet in that direction and suggest the party is opting for a more pragmatic, less dogmatic approach.
“We want to offer a new kind of strategy which includes more engagement--with NGOs [non-governmental organizations], the international community, people [in general]“ Nasharudin Mat Isa, PAS’s new deputy president, told Asia Times Online. “We want to open ourselves to dialogue with others and understand others.“
It will not be an easy task. PAS has alienated many people in multicultural Malaysia, with its narrow, quixotic interpretation of Islam. Most controversial has been its core aspiration since the party’s inception in 1951: to turn Malaysia into an Islamic state. (An Islamic state grants unequal rights to Muslims and non-Muslims.)
The election results give no indication that the party is going to revise its position. The 43-year-old Nasharudin predicted that PAS’s approach to the Islamic state issue, ie tone, may well change, but said the substance of that change was another matter. “Policy-wise we don’t know. We’ll have to look at it.“
Nasharudin suggested that, alas, the Islamic state controversy has obscured the party’s other platforms. “The media raises [the Islamic state issue] more than we do. If you follow the [PAS] presidential speech there was only mild mention of it.“
It is in these other areas that the new leaders’ presence might be felt most. “They may not insist on the primacy of certain positions--such as hudud [laws], and [a traditional] role for women,“ said Chandra Muzaffar, president of the International Movement for a Just World. “That would be a change. But I don’t know how they will fare when put to the test on fundamental issues involving the Muslim community, such as the Islamic state, and the current controversy over needle exchange and condom distribution.“
ATIMES.COM

People hold the flag of the Basque Country during a demonstration in Madrid, Spain, June 4. (Reuters File Photo)

What the peace negotiators of Northern Ireland have taught the world with its plethora of ethnic conflicts--albeit many less than a decade ago--is the power of ambiguity. But can ambiguity live forever? (Northern Ireland is working out an answer to that question still, eleven years since the ceasefire of the Irish Republican Army, in August 1994, and seven years since the momentous Good Friday peace agreement.) Maybe not, but it appears it can live long enough to change the culture of violence.
Spain now confronts the same question with the Basque struggle for independence. As Saturday’s mass march organised by the Association of the Victims of Terrorism in Madrid reminded us, passions on both side of the fence run very high.
The relatively new socialist government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has broken the long-standing logjam of Spanish politics by announcing that it is prepared to talk to ETA, the armed wing of the Basque political movement, Batasuna, as long as ETA renounces violence. But that on its own, it is becoming clear, won’t be enough to bring ETA to the table. ETA wants to hear that Madrid recognises that the destiny of the Basque country is first and foremost in its own people’s hands.
Historians recall that the story of Northern Ireland began with a fudge when, in 1921, the Irish prime minister, Eamonn de Valera, went along with the creation of Northern Ireland, convincing himself and the Irish electorate that the border would be temporary. Until the IRA was reborn in the 1960s, that did keep the peace.
Real peace finally came to Northern Ireland over the last decade with a number of new fudges, the parties lying to each other and to themselves. It is what one observer has called “a working misunderstanding“. It successfully created a non-violent political environment that enabled each side to believe it can fulfill its political agenda by peaceful means, though we, outsiders, could and can see that the agendas are in fact irreconcilable.
Can Spain repeat this success? It has much going for it. Its basic problems are less severe than Northern Ireland’s. There is no religious divide. The region is prosperous. The regional government led by Juan Jos? Ibarretxe, a Basque nationalist, controls the police. Many items on the Basque agenda seem reasonable--after all, Scotland has long had its own judiciary and, more recently, as I have just discovered, is quietly opening its own diplomatic missions in places like China. The roof hasn’t fallen in on Britain, and why should it on Spain?
But Madrid must realise that there is one step it has to take, one that will certainly cause Zapatero a full frontal assault from his opponents in the conservative Popular Party who still rankle from their unexpected defeat in last year’s elections.
This crucial step is to repeat what Britain did in Northern Ireland when London publicly recognised the Irish people’s right to determine their own future. It was this that brought the IRA to the negotiating table, and it is clear that ETA/Batasuna are holding out for a similar form of words.
Spaniards on both sides of the political spectrum say they will never concede this. But in truth, it would just be one more useful fudge. As the recent regional elections for the Basque country made clear, the militant Basque cause is declining in intensity. Indeed, Zapatero should be prepared eventually to go even further and say that he finds no problem about Ibarretxe’s desire to hold a referendum on self-determination. Despite all the posturing and all the rhetoric, the fact is the militants could never convincingly win a referendum.
TRANSNATIONAL.ORG/FORUM/POWER

When UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan went to Darfur recently, he went to the front line--to Labado, where more than a hundred people died in one of those aerial bombardments the Sudan government says isn’t happening. When he went to Southern Sudan, he went to the back line--to Rumbek, administrative center of the new Government of Southern Sudan (GoSS), where the children of a relief generation greeted him with banners saying: “Kofi, no food, hunger imminent.“ Had Annan gone to the front line--to a village like Payuer, on the east bank of the White Nile--he would have received a very different message. “The war’s not over.“
Five months after Africa’s longest-running civil war ended--officially, at least--Rumbek and Payuer are worlds apart. Everyone visits Rumbek; almost no one visits Payuer. Peace will not break down in Rumbek, but it could in Payuer.
People here aren’t asking for food: not one person, among scores interviewed in the course of a week, even mentioned it. Their message to the international community is this: “You forced this peace through. Now take the government militias away--or see peace fail.“
Throughout the war, the Khartoum government used ethnic militias to divide and rule, denying any hand in the resulting mayhem. “Tribal trouble,“ it said, as it says now in Darfur. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was negotiated, and signed, only by the Khartoum government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). The militias had no involvement in it. And in Northern Upper Nile, around Payuer, they are not fading away. Far from it: they are recruiting--at government urging, defectors say--training and attacking. Not quite as before, it’s true. But attacking nonetheless.
Since the CPA was signed, government-supported Southern militias have attacked two SPLA positions around the oilfields near Payuer and displaced Southern civilians from a number of villages. The government has responded by promoting the militia leaders, confirming local people in the belief that the attacks were government-inspired. Militiamen who have chosen to join their kin in SPLA-controlled territory have paid a heavy price: their villages have been attacked and looted, and their families displaced.
The people of Payuer see a short-term and a long-term goal in the continued activation of the militias. Both involve oil, an industry currently worth more than a billion dollars a year to the Khartoum government. In the short term, they say, the government means to keep oil flowing, in ever greater quantities, by forcibly removing any people who still live in its way; in the long term, Khartoum will use the militias to fight against the separation of the South (and its oil) if Southerners vote for separation in a referendum in six years’ time.
The war in Southern Sudan was fought for 21 years and took more than a million lives without ever reaching the UN Security Council. Darfur was raised at the Security Council in May 2004, barely a year after the rebellion there began. The oil war that has raged in Southern Sudan from 1998 onward never captured international imagination, and indignation, in the way that Darfur has. But it was every bit as terrible. Villages were burned, civilians slaughtered, women and children raped and mutilated. Most of the oil discovered in Sudan is located in the South, and to exploit it the government first had to capture the land under which it lay. Hundreds of thousands of Southerners were displaced and remain displaced.
DAILYSTAR.COM.LB