S Sivasegaram

1. Introduction

While class contradiction remains the fundamental contradiction in all class society, uneven development of capitalism has ensured that class exploitation and oppression would vary in form so that the struggle against class oppression, to succeed, needs to adopt different strategies. Under colonial and semi-colonial domination the struggle was against the main oppressor and emerged as an anti-colonial struggle that united anti-imperialist forces while being conscious of contradictions with the local capitalist and feudal classes. Imperialist strategy changed with the elimination of direct colonial rule; and neo-colonialism, while formally recognising the sovereignty of former colonies and semi-colonies, developed methods for direct and indirect control over them. In countries where a bourgeois elite group replaced the colonial masters, contradictions that were dormant under colonial domination became important for a variety of reasons.

The absence of a visible foreign oppressor, combined with rivalry among the elite for political power and control over wealth, and the need to divert attention from the failure of the new ruling classes to solve the pressing economic problems enabled contradictions based on identity other than class to come to the fore. With nationalism failing to provide answers to problems based on neo-colonial oppression, the ruling elite encouraged and exploited contradictions based on ethnicity, religion, region and caste, and were often helped in the process by the failings of the left. It is in such a context that the national contradiction came to dominate politics in Sri Lanka. In Sri Lanka, the aggravation of the national question and its transformation into national oppression and war has made the national question the main contradiction to the extent that, without going some way towards its resolution, it will not be possible to make progress in the anti-imperialist struggle, let alone achieving working class solidarity and carrying forward the struggle for social justice.

The purpose of this commentary is to trace the historical development of ethnic and national consciousness in Sri Lanka, the development of the contradictions and their transformation into national conflict, oppression and war; and to identify the respective roles played by ethnicity as well as class interests and ideology. The commentary also deals with the different class- and ideology-based approaches to the solution of the national question as well as briefly touches on the role of forces of foreign domination in the aggravation of the problem and to impose solutions that serve their interests.

While the national question is now the main contradiction in Sri Lanka, one needs to be aware that the contradiction has been conditioned by class interests and that various vested interests have been at play in transforming it into war and in prolonging the war. Although the war is visibly between the armed forces of the Sinhala dominated Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) claiming to represent the entire Tamil nationality, a satisfactory resolution of the national question needs to address other less known contradictions that form part of the national question.

Discussion of the Sri Lankan national question and its manifestation as a war spanning 24 years, with brief lulls, has often been conditioned by subjective interpretations of the problem and its history, and by limited objectives. Subjective interpretations of history, especially but not exclusively by the Sinhala nationalists, have gone a long way towards conditioning attitudes towards other communities and the relationships among nationalities and national minorities. It is also important to recognise the role of class, caste and region in the emergence of ethnic and national identities. The myth of ‘purity’ of race too has played a role in the consolidation of ethnic identities, and claims largely based on myths concerning who the first settlers in the island (and therefore the ‘true sons of the soil’) are feed chauvinistic attitudes all round.

While the resolution of the national question concerns more pressing issues than quarrels relating to ancient history, or for that matter prehistory, an understanding of the emergence of ethnic identities over the ages and their fairly recent consolidation into political categories, and how socio-economic developments since the colonial era, the introduction of electoral politics under British rule, and rivalries among elite classes conditioned relationship between the various ethnic groups will be of use in understanding the nature of the problem. Thus the next section will deal with the development of ethnic identities in the context of the relationship between communities, and elite class rivalries that gave rise to ethnic conflicts. The section that follows it will deal with the national problem which had at its centre the contradiction between the Sinhala and Tamil nationalities and leading up to the crisis of 1983. The fourth section provides an overview of the national question from the time that it was transformed into a war up to the current situation, and the fifth section deals with the different approaches to the national crisis and its solution. The final section briefly presents the case for a solution to the national question based on the principle of the right to self-determination applied on the broadest possible basis.

2. The Land and its People: Emerging Ethno-Political Identities

The history of the country and its people cannot be said to be well documented, although historians draw on Mahavansa written around the 5th or 6th century tracing back to the arrival of the exiled mythical Prince Vijaya and his companions from northern India. The chronicle written by Theravaada Buddhist clergymen emphasises contradictions with the once powerful Mahayana Buddhism as well as ‘alien’ Tamils. The historiography of Sri Lanka, with the exception of fairly recent writings by secular modern historians, has been conditioned by the notion that the Sinhalese are the people of the land, Buddhism their religion, and all else alien. The claim that the entire Sinhala race, at times referred to as the Arya Sinhala race, are the descendents of Vijaya and his companions has been propagated through the ages; and in modern times intensely through both state and private media, and through textbooks. This approach has been a major stumbling block to objective archaeological studies until several decades after independence; and subjective interpretations of archaeological data to suit the Arya Sinhala myth as well as the Sinhala Buddhist ideology that struck root under British rule in the 19th century still dominate Sinhala historiography. The fallacy of attaching a Sinhala-Buddhist national identity to the ancient feudal state persists despite the fact that many of the kings, including some of the most famed, were not really ‘Sinhalese’ and had, in addition, South Indian queens who worshipped at Hindu shrines. There was no hostility between the ethnic groups or for that matter between natives and visitors, whereas rivalry between Buddhist monasteries for royal favour and between pretenders to the throne for state power had been important causes for disorder.

Sinhala nationalist claims have been contested by Tamil nationalists, who point to the existence of a Tamil kingdom based in the Jaffna peninsula that defied the Portuguese as well as to Tamil principalities and chieftaincies that survived into the British colonial era. References to Saivaite (Hindu) shrines in the island exist in Tamil hymns composed in the 6th-7th century during the Pallava period of South India. More recent excavations point to the existence of the Tamil inscriptions in the northern part of the island dating back to the 3rd century BC. Besides, there is strong evidence that Buddhism thrived among Tamils in the island at least up to the period of Maanikkavacakar close to 10th century A.D., and the dagabas unearthed in the north of the island, at least in size, resemble those in Tamilnadu better than the massive structures that are characteristic of Sinhala Buddhist dagabas in the South. But to argue therefore that the Tamils of today are the descendents of the ancient Tamils will be as absurd as to claim that the Sinhalese are the descendents of an exiled prince and his companions.

While the possibility of mass scale immigration to the country seems remote, immigration from India, especially South India, has taken place for many centuries under conditions of peace as well as war. Besides the two major South Indian invasions that are said to have dealt deathblows to major Sinhala civilisations, rival kingdoms in the island have throughout history used the services of South Indian rulers as well as mercenaries to settle their disputes. A variety of craftsmen and tradesmen have come into the island over the centuries, with many of them preserving their identity as individual castes. An examination of Sinhala family names (Tamils did not have a system of family names until the modern era) will show names which are distinctly Tamil and Malayalam that probably date back to not more than a few centuries.

At least two caste groups, namely the Karave (fisher folk) and Salagama, are known to have South Indian origins going back only a few centuries. The Salagama, the vast majority of who were brought into the island by the Dutch in the 17th and 18th centuries, had refused to be identified with the rest of the Sinhala community as recently as early 20th century, although they adopted Sinhala as their medium of communication. Equally, there have been several foreign settlements among Tamils. When one takes into account the geography of the island that allows easy movement across the land or along the coast and the fact that there was no nation state in the island which was for most time ruled by rival kings, with parts of the territory under local chieftains, the prospects for inter-racial mixing was high. Also the island, besides continuous interaction with its south Asian neighbours, as well as China during certain periods, has been visited by the Arabs who used the island as a trading post for many centuries before the arrival of European powers on its shores.

Thus, while distinct ethnic identities have emerged in the country and have been consolidated and reinforced by socio-political developments, much remains in common between the people and continue to be more than what are used to divide them.

There are four main nationalities in the island.

The Sinhalese and Sinhala Nationalism. Sinhala identity is based on the mother tongue. However, since the late 19th century the emphasis has shifted towards Sinhala Buddhism, so that the Roman Catholic and Protestant Christian Sinhalese are viewed with some suspicion and hostility by extreme Sinhala Buddhist nationalists.

Caste remains an important identifier but its importance has declined in public life; social oppression by caste has been very much eliminated, notably since the formation of the SLFP-led government led by SWRD Bandaranaike in 1956. The decline in the importance of caste was partly due to the access of sizeable sections of caste groups in the coastal areas (earlier ranked low in the caste hierarchy) to modern education, new trades and commercial ventures under colonial rule. Colonial patronage led to the emergence of a land-owning elite class with feudal origins and an emergent merchant capitalist class with feudal links.

Strong differences existed between the Sinhalese of the Hill Country who resisted foreign rule until the fall of Kandyan Kingdom in the early 19th century to the British and the Low Country Sinhalese who lived in the coastal belt and were subject to European colonial domination staring in the 16th century and direct colonial rule by the Portuguese, the Dutch and finally the British rules through various compromises with European colonists. The first proposal from a Sri Lankan national for federal government was from Bandaranaike in 1929 during colonial rule, in which he sought separate states for the Kandyan and the Low Country Sinhalese.

The current Sinhala national identity although slow to emerge was guided by Sinhala Buddhist ideology whose foundations were laid in the 19th Century. Its initial targets were the Christian missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, and in the late 19th Century led to localised violence against Catholics at Kochikade about 35 km north of Colombo. The anti-Muslim riots of 1915 mark the first occasion on which widespread violence was directed against a community. The violence was the result of rivalry between the up-and-coming Sinhala Buddhist traders and the already well established Muslim traders. There was also rivalry with South Indian traders who were dominant in some sectors of business, and this rivalry was dealt with by the Citizenship Act, introduced at the time of independence in 1948 to deprive an entire ethnic group, mainly comprising plantation workers, of their right to citizenship.

Sinhala chauvinism developed adherents among the petit bourgeoisie; and the right-wing trade unionist AE Goonesinghe, one of the founder leaders of the trade union movement in the country, targeted the strong Malayali working class community based in Colombo that played a major role in building up the left-wing trade union movement, and in particular that affiliated to the Communist Party.

The Tamil elite with a feudal background was conservative in its thinking. Although some of the Tamils who settled in Colombo were successful in business, and acquired considerable wealth, Tamils (meaning here Ceylon Tamils as they were known then, with roots in the Northern and Eastern Provinces) were not serious rivals to the Sinhalese in the business sector to be seen as a threat by the Sinhala business community. Rivalry with Tamils largely concerned middle class aspirations. A resolution was introduced in the State Council in 1943 to replace English with Sinhala as the official language, by JR Jayawardane who was to be a founder member of the United National Party (UNP), formed on the eve of national independence. Although it was deflected by consensus to make Tamil also an official language, the resolution was a clear indicator of what lay ahead for the Tamil middle classes whose presence was strong among white collar government employees. The advantage that the Tamils had in state employment was because of the setting up of Christian missionary schools in the Jaffna peninsula which gave a head start for the Tamil elite as well as middle classes, subject to caste barriers. Making Sinhala the sole official language on 1956 was, rightly, seen by the Tamil leaders as an act of discrimination against Tamils. That was to be followed in the decades to come by blatant discrimination against the Tamils in education, employment and various other fields.

Sinhala nationalism developed in the course of aggressive expansion of the emergent Sinhala capitalist class and the consolidation of political power in the hands of an elite class with feudal origins and loyalty to the British colonial masters.

Tamil identity and Tamil nationalism. The term ‘Tamil nationality’ generally refers to Tamils (once known as ‘Ceylon Tamils’) from the Northern and Eastern Provinces, and excludes the Muslims and Hill Country Tamils.

Tamil awareness based on linguistic identity was subject to various constraints and slow to emerge. Tamil Saivaite (also referred to as Tamil Hindu) revivalism in the latter part of the 19th century arose in response to Protestant Christian proselytising in the north, which took advantage of missionary control of modern school education and thereby access to the professions and state employment. Notably, conversion to Protestant Christianity was not in protest against caste oppression but for socio-economic advantage, and attracted mainly the upper caste middle classes who formed the core of the caste-conscious Tamil community of the north. Tamil Saivaite revivalism, like its Sinhala Buddhist counterpart, was not anti-colonial, but anti-Christian.

A class of traders in agricultural produce, tobacco in particular, emerged under British rule and traded in the South as well as in South India. Some of the more successful sections of the Tamil elite invested in education and in property in the South, mainly in Colombo, to become the Colombo-based Tamil elite whose members dominated Tamil politics in the early part of the 20th century.

Given the predominance of the Vellala caste in the North and the exclusion of the depressed castes from access to education and opportunity for social advancement, the Jaffna-centred Tamil politics initially emphasised Tamil Vellala Saivaite interests and in course of time accommodated Christians from the same background. This leadership, based in Colombo, was insensitive to the aspirations of Tamil masses living outside its power base in the Jaffna peninsula. With caste divisions running deep and caste oppression more severe than elsewhere in the island, the emergence of a Tamil national identity had to wait until this elite group was confronted by Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism.

The prospect of sharing the spoils with the colonial masters implied rivalry among the elite groups. The nature of the rivalry became more clearly on ethnic lines following the move towards elected government, and universal franchise soon after. It is, however, remarkable that Tamils in the North were the first to articulate progressive political thought: a sizeable section of the educated Tamil middle classes and an enlightened section of the elite, inspired by the Indian independence movement and leaders like Gandhi and Nehru, formed the Jaffna Youth Congress which was the first organisation in the country to call for complete independence from British colonial rule. (It was the left movement of the country that carried that campaign forward, but a combination of circumstances ensured that Sri Lanka had no independence struggle comparable with those in other Asian colonies of the time). The Youth Congress also defied the conservative elite in standing by the women and the depressed castes to call for universal franchise. Thus, despite awareness of Tamil ethnic identity, the Tamil leadership of the time thought in terms of the whole country so that a Tamil nation and secession were not serious political considerations, although betrayal by their Sinhala elite counterparts led the prominent Tamil political leader P Arunachalam and later P Ramanathan to found Tamil political organisations in the 1920s.

Sinhala nationalism, or rather Sinhala-Buddhist ideology, became increasingly assertive in the run up to independence, and it was against this background that Tamil parliamentary political parties emerged. Tamil Congress, the main Tamil political party of the time, and other Tamil leaders were willing to barter their support to the Sinhala nationalist UNP in exchange for cabinet posts and other favours. Class interests ensured that this love-hate relationship survived several tests.

The Tamil leaders were offended by the design of the national flag, which emphasised Sinhala predominance. Colonisation schemes, conceived in the post World War II years before independence and implemented since the early 1950s in the Eastern Province, aimed at taking away fertile land from Tamils and Muslims and settling Sinhalese there and thereby reduce the Tamils and Muslims to a minority in their traditional homeland, did not pass unnoticed, but did not lead to a struggle at the time. The Citizenship Act which deprived the Hill Country Tamils (then known as Indian Tamils) was supported by several Tamil MPs for various inducements offered by the UNP leadership, but was opposed by the entire left. The dubious role played by the ACTC leadership in this issue led to a split in the ACTC and the founding of the Federal Party (FP) in 1949.

The FP claimed to speak for all the Tamil-speaking people (including the Muslims and Hill Country Tamils) and sought a federal form of government with the Northern and Eastern Provinces constituting a federal state for the Tamil-speaking people and the rest of the country a predominantly Sinhala state. The kind of federal solution proposed by the FP showed a lack of vision since it was inadequate to address the problems faced by the Muslims who were distributed throughout the island with pockets of large concentrations in the east and along the west coast of the island. The FP demanded the restoration of citizenship to the Hill Country Tamils, but abandoned the Hill Country Tamils to the putative Sinhala dominated federal state. Nevertheless, it was the FP that gave form to the concept of Tamil national identity. But it took until the ‘Sinhala Only’ cry of 1956 for the FP to establish itself as the main Tamil party.

The concept of ‘Tamil-speaking people’ alone was inadequate to unite the three ethnic groups against oppression by Sinhala nationalism. The FP, which in reality only represented the Tamils (‘Ceylon Tamils’), by addressing the national question as one concerning a Sinhala-speaking majority and a Tamil-speaking minority, failed not only to take into account the fact that each of the three ‘Tamil-speaking’ ethnic groups had developed separate identities but also to appreciate the complex socio-economic and political circumstances under which it happened. And the just cause of the Tamils for their rights paid dearly for this folly in the decades to come.

Muslims, and Religion as Ethnic Marker. The Sri Lankan Muslim community is predominantly Tamil-speaking, but has maintained an identity distinct from that of Tamils. There are many reasons for this. Firstly, the Muslim community is scattered throughout the country with a majority living in the predominantly Sinhala South. While the claim by some Muslim leaders that they are descendants of Arab settlers in Sri Lanka is questionable, it cannot be denied that a significant number have Arab ancestors. The argument that the Muslims adopted Tamil as their language merely because it was the language of commerce in the region will not apply to all or even most Muslims. The desire for the community to hold together and the presence of a sizeable number of Muslims of South Indian origin could have played an important part in the choice of a common language. However, the Muslims have lived in relative harmony with their Sinhalese and Tamil neighbours until the emergence of Sinhala and Tamil nationalist politics.

The importance that the Muslims attach to their linguistic identity varies with class and geographic location. However, the religious identity, in addition to taking precedence over the linguistic, has become very assertive within the community.

At the time of independence there was a considerable large Tamil-speaking ‘Indian Muslim’ community besides other Muslim communities of Indian origin. The population of these communities, especially the ‘Indian Muslims’, has shrunk since independence for a variety of reasons, and while these communities do preserve their identity within the Muslim nationality, they increasingly tend to identify themselves publicly as Muslims.

Among subjective factors that contributed to the Muslims insisting on an identity distinct from the Tamils are the tendency for certain Tamil nationalist leaders to claim that the Muslims are Tamils who had converted to Islam, and memories of the anti-Muslim violence of 1915, when a very prominent Tamil leader took the side of the Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinists at whose hands the Muslims had suffered. Considerations of survival made it necessary for the Muslims to adapt to their environment, and efforts by the Tamil nationalist leadership to count them among Tamils while not addressing problems specific to them drove the Muslims further away from an identity based on language. Muslim attitudes were further hardened by hostile acts by the Tamil militant movements since the mid-1980s.

Although the Muslims have for long asserted in various ways their identity as a nationality distinct from the Tamils, there was no claim to nationhood until the mid-1980s. The notion of a ‘Muslim nation’ has been actively promoted by a section of the Muslims from the East since the early-1990s, but has failed to attract mass support, although the creation of one or several Muslim autonomous units in regions with large Muslim concentrations had broad appeal among the Muslims.

It should also be noted here that a lack of facilities in much of the South to learn in the Tamil medium, the hope of better career prospects by learning in the Sinhala medium, and persuasion by a section of the Southern Muslim leadership have tempted an increasing number of Muslims, especially from the middle classes in the South, to have their children educated in the Sinhala medium. The evolution of a Sinhala-speaking Muslim community with little knowledge of Tamil would have serious implications for the unity of the Muslims as a nationality.

Hill Country Tamils. The term Hill Country Tamils refers to the descendents of people who were brought into the country in the 19th century by the British, mostly as indentured labour and employed predominantly in the plantations. They were deprived of their citizenship and the right to vote in 1948 and, under the ‘Sirima-Shastri Pact’ of 1964, India agreed to the ‘repatriation’ of some 525,000 to India while Sri Lanka would grant citizenship to 300,000, and the fate of the rest (estimated at 150,000) would be determined later. This harsh decision was denounced by the genuine left since the Pact failed to consider the views of the people affected by the decision, a vast majority of whom would have preferred Sri Lankan citizenship. The agreement, to be implemented within a 15-year time frame, was slow to take effect for many political and practical reasons.

The plantation workers are still the lowest-paid wage labourers in the country with a normal daily wage less than half that for casual unskilled labour in urban areas. The nationalisation of the plantations in 1972 under land reform legislation, falsely hailed by the parliamentary left as a socialist measure, led to Sinhala nationalists taking control of the plantations at various managerial levels and brought further misery to the plantation workers. Some tea estates were closed, the workers expelled, and the land distributed to Sinhalese villages for political gain. The drought conditions that followed in 1973-75 led to a shortage of working days. This combination of circumstances drove a sizeable section of the plantation workers out of the tea estates and a large number were reduced to begging on the streets. Those who moved to the North in search of agricultural and farm work found that life was no better under Tamil employers. Attempts by humane Tamil nationalists to settle the Hill Country Tamils in the North and the East had limited success owing to difficulties created by the state. The deteriorating living conditions in the plantations, escalating ethnic tension since 1977, and the violence against the Hill Country Tamils in 1980 and 1983 led, in a decade since 1975, to the ‘repatriation’ of around four hundred thousand Hill Country Tamils to India, a land where none of them had ever set foot before.

The term Indian Tamil was used to refer to them until the 1960s in view of the relatively recent Indian origin compared to the Sinhala and (Ceylon) Tamil nationalities. The Hill Country Tamils are predominantly members of the working class employed in the tea and rubber plantations; a smaller section is employed in other sectors in different parts of the country. There is a sizeable middle class comprising middle-level managers, small traders and a slowly growing class of white-collar workers. The term Hill Country Tamils replaced the term Indian Tamils in the 1960s, to emphasise the sense of belonging to Sri Lanka and not India.

Wealthy members of the community resent the term Hill Country Tamils in view of its association with the plantations and the implied class connotations; and recent attempts to re-label the community as “Tamils of Indian Origin” have not succeeded as a result of the rise in political consciousness of the Hill Country Tamils and their assertion of their identity as a distinct nationality. Political consciousness was slow to arrive owing to the educational backwardness of the community and the systematic denial of educational opportunities by the plantation management, which also ensured that, at least in the tea estates where most of them lived, the Tamil-speaking workers did not interact with the Sinhalese from villages neighbouring the estates. Hostility thus existed between the plantation workers and poor and landless Sinhalese peasants in parts of the central highlands, where the peasantry saw the plantation workers as alien occupiers of the land which could have been lawfully theirs. This hostility suited both the Sinhala exploiting classes and the Hill Country Tamil elite that dominated the trade unions in the plantations, since it prevented the coming together of two severely oppressed sections of the population. There was also resentment among Hill Country Tamils about exploitation by the ‘high-caste’ middle-class Tamils, mainly from the North, working as teachers and officials from British colonial times and well into the 1960s.

Although ethnic consciousness among Hill Country Tamils developed in response Sinhala chauvinism and exploitation by middle-class Tamils from the North, political consciousness, hindered by the disenfranchisement in 1948, was slow to develop. The reactionary elite of the Ceylon Workers’ Congress (CWC) took advantage of the ‘Indian’ label to keep unionised labour in its control, and the poor educational background and the restrictive practices of the plantation management stood in the way of progressive politics.

Hard work by educationalists from the community, leftists, and progressive trade unionists enabled the emergence of a sizeable population of politically conscious educated youth and to greater awareness of the rights among the people. A series of mass struggles led in stages to the eventual restoration of citizenship to all Hill Country Tamils near the end of the last millennium, further consolidating the status of Hill Country Tamils as a distinct nationality. Meantime the Hill Country Tamils face increased threats from forces of Sinhala chauvinism seeking to weaken them politically by a process of Sinhala colonisation and forced displacement of the Hill Country Tamils from areas where they live in large numbers.

Besides the four nationalities, there are several national minorities that have historically asserted their individuality. The following are the most important among them.

Burghers. The term refers to descendents of the Portuguese and Dutch settlers in the Island. The Portuguese settled in larger numbers than the Dutch and there has been considerable mixing with the local population. Within the Burgher community, which is entirely urban and predominantly English-speaking, there is a sharp distinction between the Portuguese descendents who are almost exclusively Roman Catholics and the descendents of the Dutch, a majority of whom belong to the Dutch Reformed Church.  The numerically smaller Burgher community living among Tamils of the North and East uses Tamil for its day-to-day activities and, until recently, had a sizeable number of speakers of a Portuguese Creole.

The Burgher community outside the North and East, although culturally European-oriented, was well integrated with the local communities, had a strong sense of belonging, and actively participated in national politics. Notably, some of the best works on the history, culture, geography and the flora and the fauna of the country were by eminent members of the Burgher community.

The rise of Sinhala-Buddhism and the animosity of the Sinhala nationalists towards Burghers worried the community so that, following the passage of the Official Language Act (better known as the ‘Sinhala Only’ Act) in 1956, a majority, from among the lighter skinned English-speaking sections, took advantage of the immigration policy of the Australian government giving preference to European descendents, to migrate to Australia in large numbers. The remaining members still retain their ethnic identity as Burghers, but are less assertive in the political affairs of the country.

Malays. The community comprises descendents of people from Java, brought into the island by the Dutch colonial masters who also controlled Indonesia, and ethnic Malays who arrived later during British rule from Malaya (now the most populous part of Malaysia). Several prominent political and social leaders came from the community, which asserted its distinctness from the Muslims (then referred to as Ceylon and Indian Moors).

A combination of circumstances, including the marginalisation of the community in sectors of employment, like the armed forces and the police, where there was significant Malay presence, and the rise of Muslim nationalism, has politically weakened the Malays. Despite alignment with mainstream Muslim politics, the Malays are still assertive of their social and cultural identity as distinct from the Muslim nationality.

Attho. The plight of the aboriginals of this country is comparable with that of many native communities in the Americas and Australia. The Attho, numbering around 4500, have preserved the basic features of the aboriginal community for over 2500 years and live mainly in the forests of the Mahiyangana region of the Uva Province, and make their livelihood as hunter-gatherers and chena (slash and burn) cultivators. Their territory has gradually shrunk as a result of systematic encroachment in the name of development, by the state as well as by capitalist predators.  The Attho have their own language, which probably has a longer history in the island than either Sinhala or Tamil. Their system of worship, customs and cultural traditions are distinct from those of the Sinhalese and Tamils, although there has always been interaction between the Attho and the Tamils and Sinhalese in adjoining regions.

The community, while finding it increasingly hard to make a living in the traditional way, is not presented with opportunities to modernise on its own terms. Meanwhile, there is, with state support, social and political pressure on the Attho to abandon their way of life and thereby assimilate it to Sinhala Buddhist identity.

Other Muslim communities: Special mention must be made of other communities such as the Borah, and Memens, who are considered part of the Muslim nationality, have distinct ethnic roots and cultural features and therefore assert their individuality to resist integration with the Sri Lankan Muslims. Indian Muslims, who were once distinguished from their Sri Lankan Counterparts by the terms Ceylon Moor and Indian Moor, have dwindled in number. Given their cultural proximity to the Sri Lankan Muslims, they could in course of time integrate with the latter.

Other Communities with Tamil Identity. Immigrant communities from South India such as the Colombo Chetties and the Parava who settled mainly along the west coast have kept their Tamil linguistic identity but have always asserted their respective identities as distinct from that of the Tamils. The term Indian Tamils refers to people of Indian nationality living in Sri Lanka as well as to naturalised Indian Tamils. They are largely members of business communities and are reluctant to be identified with the other Tamil nationalities.

Excluded Sinhala Communities. Two Sinhala-speaking communities with a long history, namely the Rodi, a community of outcastes, and the Gypsies are not integrated with the Sinhala society. Both communities have been historically discriminated against and viewed with a mix of suspicion, fear and contempt.

Malayalis. Although the Malayalis have ceased to be a distinct ethnic group in Sri Lanka, they, despite being a community of immigrant workers, made a positive impact on the political affairs of the island. They were closely identified with the people of this country and contributed to the winning of trade union and political rights. The leading role played by the vibrant Malayali immigrant community of workers and intelligentsia in the early part of the 20th century in the left and trade union movement met with the wrath of Sinhala chauvinism in the 1930s, which led to the elimination of the Malayali ethnic identity. A considerable number of Malayalis stayed back even after independence, of whom a majority returned to Kerala by 1960 while those who remained have integrated themselves with the Sinhala and Tamil nationalities.

The foregoing identifies the role of Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism in marginalising ethnic minorities from the various sectors of social activity in the country. It also identifies how narrow nationalism grew in response to chauvinism and the role of class in the emergence of nationalist and ethnic politics. Thus, even before independence from colonial rule, signs had emerged that, in the absence of predominance of working-class politics, the national question would take centre stage in the politics of the island.

3. The National Question Becomes the Main Contradiction

The Run-up to the Sea Change of 1956. As stated earlier, there was no independence struggle in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). In 1948, the British colonial masters transferred power to a loyal group of Sinhala nationalist elite who dominated the UNP. The unitary form of government as set out in the constitution, despite the built-in safeguards against legislation inimical to the minority communities, failed at its first hurdle with the disenfranchisement of the Hill Country Tamils. There was no possibility of redress for this injustice through the parliamentary system, which was to become tyranny in the name of the majority. Given the conservative elitist leadership of the CWC representing the plantation workers, the indifference of the ACTC, and a majority of the Tamil MPs who had become part of the government, the campaign against the legislation fizzled out.

Although the Muslims were the main target of the Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinists because of business rivalries in early in the 20th century and the Malayalis in the 1930s for anti-left political reasons, with the Hill Country Tamils politically disarmed in 1948, the Tamil community became the main target of Sinhala chauvinism in the 1950s. The predominance of Tamils in a large and contiguous territory, their claim to a long history in the island, and the challenge posed by the Tamil leadership to Sinhala dominance were major considerations. However, the emergence of a new generation of educated middle classes Sinhalese vying with the Tamils for government jobs and other white collar employment was of greater electoral significance than matters that directly concerned bourgeois and feudal elite interests.

The Tamil leadership was conscious of the intentions of the Sinhala chauvinist leadership so that the ACTC had proposed an alternative formula for parliamentary representation in independent Sri Lanka that would avert a Sinhala-dominated government with absolute power. But the way in which the proposal was structured failed to gain support from other minority communities and was rejected. Despite its own approach being based on parliamentary political strategy, the FP, newly formed in 1949, saw the flaw in the collaborationist approach of the ACTC, and warned the Tamils that what befell the Hill Country Tamils would soon befall them. The FP demanded a federal form of government that would safeguard the interests of the ‘Tamil-speaking people’ as a whole, but failed to convince the Jaffna Tamil electorate at the polls in 1952, and was badly defeated by the ACTC.

The fortunes of the FP changed with the adoption of the ‘Sinhala Only’ language policy by both the UNP and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP, founded in 1951 by UNP dissenters led by Bandaranaike) in the run up to the general election in 1956; the FP was to dominate Tamil politics since that time until Tamil militants posed a challenge from around 1980. The FP in 1956 put forward as its four demands, granting Tamil parity of status with Sinhala as official language, setting up of a federal form of government to address the concerns of the Tamil-speaking people, stopping state-sponsored colonisation of Sinhalese in predominantly Tamil-speaking areas, and granting citizenship to all Hill Country Tamils. While these were just demands, the emphasis of the FP was on the language problem which affected a sizeable section of the Tamil middle class which depended on government service for its livelihood, but not the Muslims and the Hill Country Tamils to the same extent.

Bandaranaike successfully rallied round the SLFP an assortment of the petit bourgeois classes, and capitalised on mass resentment of the UNP for its policies that failed to address the needs of the common masses as well as its brutal handling of the Hartal of 1953. Although Bandaranaike was a member of the Sinhala Christian elite who converted to Buddhism for political advantage and was not literate in Sinhala, his opportunist pledge to make Sinhala the official language had greater credibility than a similar pledge by the UNP which had ruled the country in English for eight years, and, besides stirring up Sinhala nationalist sentiments, it had mass appeal for practical reasons: it appealed to the Sinhala educated youth aspiring for government employment and addressed the resentment of the ordinary people who could not get anything done in government offices in their language and had to seek the help of someone who knew English. Thus the Sinhala Only policy was a populist move with Sinhala chauvinist as well as anti-imperialist connotations. The electoral success in 1956 of the SLFP-led alliance including the Trotskyist VLSSP of Philip Gunawardane as well as various minor chauvinistic parties, under the banner of Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP, a name that Gunawardane was to take over after the break-up of the alliance in 1959), also marked for the Sinhala masses an upsurge in national awareness and, for the first time, a sense of belonging in the affairs of the state.

The left (this time with the exception of the VLSSP which was in the MEP coalition) joined the Tamil MPs and the Muslim MPs from the East to oppose the Official Language Act making Sinhala the sole official language. Muslim MPs from the South who either belonged to the SLFP or to the UNP voted with their parties in favour of the Act.

The Tamil Response and Consequences. The response of the Tamil leadership, especially the FP, to the Act was rash. The FP organised a massive rally in Trincomalee in the same year to demand parity of status for Tamil, but with no plans for a mass struggle. They appealed to Tamil government servants not to learn Sinhala even if it meant losing their jobs, and canvassed Tamil schools in the North to cease teaching Sinhala as an optional subject.

Realising the strength of feelings among the Tamils, Bandaranaike entered into an agreement (known as the Banda-Chelva Pact) with Chelvanayakam, the leader of the FP, that went some way towards accommodating the three of the four demands of the FP that pertained to the Tamils of the North and East, through the setting up of District Councils with considerable autonomy including a major say in colonisation schemes, and provisions for the use of Tamil for official purposes, while retaining Sinhala as the official language. The Left fully supported the agreement, but Bandaranaike, when confronted by a section of the Sinhala chauvinistic Buddhist clergy with whose support he came to power in 1956, yielded and tore up the agreement.

What served as the pretext for tearing up the agreement was the campaign launched by the FP in January 1957 to replace the Sinhala character reading ‘Sri’ from motor vehicle number plates with its Tamil equivalent. The introduction of the character ‘Sri’ in late 1957 to replace the existing English letter series was a gesture to please Sinhala chauvinists. The over-reaction of the FP to make it a campaign issue led to Sinhala chauvinists blacking out Tamil letters in name boards of shops, streets etc. and culminated in the first major anti-Tamil violence of May 1958. (There were, however, several incidents of attacks on Tamils in the wake of the passage of the Sinhala Only Act in 1956 but rather sporadic and much smaller in scale). The government failed to act until after the killing of several hundred Tamils and many more incidents of rape, assault, arson and looting. Rather than bring to book the culprits, the government placed under house arrest a few Sinhala extremist politicians and, to placate Sinhala chauvinist sentiments, detained all the MPs and the Senator from the FP.

In August 1958, the government passed legislation to enable the use of Tamil for a number of specified official purposes. But the provisions of the Act were rarely implemented because of willful indifference on the part of the government and government officials in key positions.

The Continuing Pattern. The pattern of events recurred with increased impact until the anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983 July. The major events that offended Tamil sentiments since 1958 and the response of the Tamil leadership are summarised below. What is important is that the series of events led to further deterioration of the relationship between the two communities to make the national question the main contradiction.

In 1960 the SLFP government made Sinhala the official language for litigation by the Language of the Courts Act. Negotiations between the government and the FP made slow progress, and in 1961 the FP, with little preparation, decided to launch a Satyagraha campaign for the language rights of the Tamils. Police brutality against demonstrators led to mass support for the campaign, the aims of which were supported by the left, although the Communist Party was critical of the approach of the FP. The faux pas by the FP in printing postal stamps for a Tamil federal state provided the pretext for the government to slap down a state of emergency and the campaign came to a grinding halt. Rather than address the just grievances of the Tamils, the government began in 1961 to implement in earnest the official language legislation.

The leaders of the FP were released from detention after several months, and launched another poorly organised campaign in 1962 to persuade the Tamil people to carry out all correspondence with the government in Tamil. The campaign failed to take off since it was the upper layers of the Tamil community, which was more at ease in English, that corresponded most with government. A campaign to persuade Tamils to settle in new land development schemes in the East around the same time too failed to take off because of unwillingness on the part of the Tamils in Jaffna to leave the peninsula. (This was, however, to change in the 1970s when agriculture became a profitable venture owing to a restriction on import of several food items). Efforts of the FP for legal redress through litigation by its clerical service trade union also proved futile.

Despite the populist approach of the FP in the 1950s and the public enthusiasm for it up to the Satyagraha of 1961, the FP had by 1962 shown beyond reasonable doubt that it was not a force capable of leading the Tamil people into struggle for their rights. It was thus condemned to tread a path no different from that of the ACTC between 1948 and 1956.

Class Alliance with the UNP and Aftershocks. In 1965 general election the FP openly sided with the UNP on the basis of an agreement between the leaders of the two parties Chelvanayakam and Dudley Senanayake (known as the Dudley-Chelva Pact) to became a partner in the UNP-led government which also included Sinhala extremist parties. Regulations for the use of the Tamil language enacted in 1966, under the Tamil Language (Special Provisions) Act of 1958, met with protests not only from the SLFP but also the LSSP and the CP, each of which had undergone a split in 1964. The revolutionary factions of the LSSP and the CP denounced the opportunism of the parliamentary left. The Regulations, like the legislation of 1958, failed to be implemented. Unable to make progress in setting up District Councils as set out in the Dudley-Chelva Pact, the FP left the government in 1968 on a weaker pretext, but continued its close relationship with the UNP and support for the government.

An SLFP-led coalition with the LSSP and CP, called the United Front (UF) swept to power in 1970 to form the government, to the dismay of the FP which boasted in 1960 and 1965 that the Tamils will be the deciding force in determining who forms the government in the country. Distrust between the FP and the UF worsened with time for a variety of reasons.

On suspicion that Tamil examiners were over-marking Tamil medium answer scripts at the GCE(AL) examination of 1970, based on which the university admissions were to be decided, a system of medium-wise ‘standardisation’ of the raw marks was introduced, thereby drastically reducing the eligibility of Tamil students to university admission, especially in the sciences and professional degree programmes. Although a government inquiry ruled that there was no malpractice, standardisation continued until 1974, after which a ‘district quota’ system was introduced, that benefited Tamil and Muslim students from educationally backward districts outside Jaffna, but led to a further drop in the overall percentage of Tamil-medium admissions. Given the dependence of the Tamil middle classes on government jobs and the professions, standardisation aroused the educated middle class Tamil youth of the north, and the seeds of militancy were sown around that time.

The JVP Shows its Fangs. Meantime, the Sinhala nationalist JVP, with Marxist pretences, launched its adventurist insurrection in April 1971. At the time the JVP was not overtly hostile to the Tamils, but portrayed the Hill Country Tamils as arms of ‘Indian expansionism’, as they understood the term, and went to the extent of wanting to rid the country of Hill Country Tamils. The armed struggle against the state, although disastrous, had an impact on Tamil militancy in the North, which witnessed a successful armed struggle led by Marxist Leninists against caste oppression between 1966 and 1971.

The Parliamentary Left Surrenders to Chauvinism. The constitution of 1972 was drafted by Colvin R de Silva a veteran Trotskyist who once suggested the demolition of a famous dagaba and use the bricks to build public toilets, and best remembered for his famous quote, “Two languages, one country. One language, two countries” in 1956. The constitution by which the country changed its name from Ceylon to Sri Lanka and declared itself a republic so that the monarch of Britain ceased to be the formal head of state, also disposed of the earlier constitutional safeguards against legislation oppressive to minority ethnic groups and made it the duty of the state ‘to protect Buddhism’. The FP, which withdrew from the Constituent Assembly (CA) set up in 1970 in protest against the refusal by the CA to consider its draft proposals, denounced the constitution. The Constitution was also strongly criticised by Marxist Leninists and other left groups that rejected the parliamentary path to socialism.

The escalation of the antagonism of the FP towards the government was to a considerable extent due to the UF government acting to undermine the standing of the FP among Tamils in various ways. But the FP compounded the problem by aligning itself more closely with the UNP and encouraging Tamil militancy. (The latter has been attributed to the electoral defeat of A Amirthalingam, who lost his seat despite the electoral success of the FP amid a decline for the first time in its share of votes received; and Amirthalingam has been accused of using the disgruntled Tamil youth to rebuild his authority in the FP).

The Drift towards Tamil Eelam. The FP decided to bury the hatchet with its rival, the ACTC to form a Tamil United Front (TUF) in 1972 to fight for the rights of the Tamils that have been denied by the new constitution. The partners, besides the FP and the ACTC, interestingly, included the CWC, whose leader S Thondaman was a nominated MP in the earlier UNP-led government but sidelined by the UF, and KW Devanayagam a prominent Tamil MP and UNP politician from the East. The TUF proved inadequate to address the escalating unrest among the Tamil youth caused by the growing frustration with the continuing discrimination in education and employment among other things and the heavy handed approach of the government in dealing with the militant youth.

The dispute over the venue for the Fourth International Tamil Research Conference in January 1974, the clumsy handling of visas for participants by the government and the desire of the FP to transform the event into political theatre to force a confrontation with the police culminated in the insensitive conduct of the police that led to the killing of nine people in a stampede, for which the government failed to take responsibility or act to bring the offenders to book. This added fuel to the fury of young Tamil militants already angered by standardisation. They responded with attempts on the life of Alfred Duraiappah, the SLFP Organiser for Jaffna, who was once an MP for Jaffna and a former popular Mayor of Jaffna. The killing of Duraiappah in 1975 July marked the start of a cycle of violence involving the Tamil militants and the police and a series of political assassinations of ‘Tamil traitors’, with the blessings of some TULF leaders, subsequently extended to rival militants as well as TULF leaders.

The Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) emerged from the TUF 1976, with the FP and a section of the ACTC as main constituents, and declared as its goal a separate state of Tamil Eelam. But it is doubted to this day if the TULF really meant it: a much spoken of public debate in 1975 between the Revolutionary Communist Party leader N Sanmugathasan and the FP parliamentarian V Tharmalingam and a subsequent series of debates on the subject involving the two parties revealed that the leaders of the TULF had no plan whatsoever to achieve its declared goal of Tamil Eelam. The TULF resolved the problem by prohibiting its members from public debates on the subject. The events that followed 1977 showed that Tamil Eelam was only a ploy to placate the disgruntled youth and deter them from militant activities and a means of reversing the declining electoral fortunes of the FP and ACTC.

Calling the TULF Bluff. The UNP, whose leader JR Jayawardane had an understanding with the TULF and the CWC, scored an unprecedented victory at the elections of 1977, bagging 5/6 of all seats in Parliament, with the SLFP reduced to a mere 8 seats out of a total of around 150 seats, and the parliamentary left, which contested separately following the break-up of the UF, suffering absolute humiliation at the polls. The leader of the TULF, Amirthalingam, was content with his new role as Leader of the Opposition in the hope that Jayawardane would deliver on his promises. While Jayawardane delivered on his promise of increasing the proportion of the students admitted on merit, a matter in which the Sinhala elite too had an interest, he had no intention of dealing with the more serious grievances of the Tamils. Instead he sought to put the Tamils ‘in their place’. The anti-Tamil violence that broke out in 1977 shortly after the elections surpassed the events of 1958 and was to be the worst act of mass crime since the arrival of European colonialists in 1505, until the pogrom of 1983. In 1980 the Hill Country Tamils faced the first spate of mob violence against them on a mass scale, although localised violence existed and was on the rise since the nationalisation of the plantations in 1973.

The Constitution of 1978 made Jayawardane Executive President, and he supplemented his almost dictatorial powers with other dubious means of political control. The constitution, however, made some concessions to the language demands of the Tamils, twenty-two years too late but not intended to be implemented, while it had provisions that militated against the interests of the Tamils, namely granting Buddhism foremost place and making Sinhala the language of administration.

Rising Militancy and the Fall of the TULF. By 1978 the TULF had started to lose its credibility with the Tamil electorate, and dissidents began to assert themselves. The UNP government passed legislation banning the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in May 1978 and followed it with the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act of July 1979. In a desperate bid for survival, the TULF leadership gambled what was left of its credibility by placing its trust in the political brokerage of AJ Wilson, an unashamed supporter of the UNP and son-in-law of the late Chelvanayakam, the much adored leader of the FP. After two years of wrangling Wilson extracted from Jayawardane in 1980 the District Development Councils Act. The DDCs were so pathetic that they had even less authority and resources than a local authority; and the government rubbed salt into the wound by its blatant malpractices during the elections for the Jaffna DDC in 1981, and topped it up with burning down the Jaffna Library, one of the finest libraries in South Asia.

It was after that the TULF flirted with the idea of doing business with the ‘parliamentary left’ to mobilise resistance to the corrupt and authoritative UNP regime. But that was not to last, and the Tamil leadership out of political desperation was soon back to its old ways of putting its faith in the UNP. The militants had become more aggressive and in the name of Tamil solidarity threatened left candidates against contesting the DDC elections and forced the Nava Samasamaja Party (NSSP) to withdraw its nominations.

Following his victory in the presidential election of October 1982, which his popular opponent Mrs Bandaranaike could not contest since Jayawardane had in 1980 stripped of her civic rights, Jayawardane delivered a body blow to parliamentary democracy by extending the life of the parliament by a further six years by conducting a referendum in December 1982. In both the presidential election and the referendum the Tamils of the North and the East demonstrated their displeasure with Jayawardane, who returned the compliment by intensifying brutality by the armed forces in the North, leading to an escalation of armed conflict between the armed forces and the youth and the holocaust of 1983.

By 1983, the TULF was very much isolated from the masses in the north so that most Tamil MPs avoided visiting their electorates initially for fear of embarrassment later for fear of their own lives. When the pogrom of 1983 was unleashed following the killing of 13 soldiers in an LTTE ambush, no part of the country was safe for Tamils. While government-backed mobs attacked Tamils in the South, the armed forces went on the rampage in the North and East. Unlike in 1958 and 1977, the Tamils had nowhere to go. The TULF had no answers, nor did the Tamil militants at the time. While the TULF leaders fled the country to save their lives, the militants stayed on; and the militants who crossed the waters had other things in mind as did the host government.

The holocaust had effectively destroyed the credibility of the moderate political leadership, although a few retained credibility on an individual basis, but not as leaders.

Less Spoken Aspects of Tamil Politics. A monolithic image of Tamil politics had come into being since the FP came to the fore in 1956. This was accompanied by a tendency to underplay the significance of caste and class oppression in the name of the struggle for Tamil rights. And discussion of caste and class, even today, is denounced by some as an attempt to divide the Tamils, even with the Tamil nationalists bitterly divided among themselves on politically less important issues.

To understand the conduct of the Tamil nationalist leadership during the past century, it is important to recognise its class loyalties. The fact that P Kandiah, of the CP, was the only leftist to be elected from the North demonstrates the power of conservative thought in the North. Tamil nationalist political parties were dominated by the Vellala elite: except for the FP nomination of a member of a depressed caste to the Senate in 1957 with backing of the LSSP, until 1977, neither the ACTC nor the FP fielded a candidate from the depressed castes comprising 30% of the Jaffna peninsula population. It was only after the successful mass movement against caste oppression led by the Marxist Leninists in 1966, the humiliation of Messrs Amirthalingam and Sivasithamparam at the polls in 1970 by the increasingly assertive depressed castes, and the creation of the electorate of Udupiddy with a sizeable depressed caste community that a candidate from among the community was fielded in 1977.

The FP consistently portrayed the left, especially the communists who were a stronger political force than the LSSP in the North, as traitors to the Tamil cause. Such labelling was possible because the CP and the LSSP lent support to the SLFP, which they saw as more progressive than the unashamedly pro-imperialist UNP. While the FP drew attention to the Sinhala chauvinism of the SLFP, it took no notice of the anti-imperialist and other progressive aspects of the SLFP. This approach was necessary, since highlighting issues of social justice will invariably concede a greater role for the left among Tamils. Thus the FP remained a single-issue party, which saw the language problem as the main problem facing the Tamils.

The betrayal of the working class and with it the minorities by the parliamentary left by entering into a coalition with the SLFP (the LSSP since 1964 and the CP since 1970) made it possible for the FP leadership to insincerely brand the entire left as traitors, although it knew that that a sizeable section of the left had split from the opportunists and as ever stood for the rights of the Tamils. But what is often forgotten is that the old left, which led the working class and the masses in the General Strike of July 1947 and the 1953 Hartal, had let down the working class in the interest of electoral politics well before it let down the Tamils. The peak point of the treachery of the old left was its betrayal of a united struggle by the workers based on 21 demands, which included political demands and addressed problems faced by the entire working class of the country. The demands, to which the trade unions affiliated to the three main left parties were signatories, had overwhelming support from the working class across the country. But the trade union action planned for 1963 was aborted as a result of the MEP and the LSSP, in turn, being tempted by the prospect of joining the SLFP government, which feared a strike based on political demands besides economic ones.

The ACTC and the FP under various pretexts opposed the SLFP-led government moves between 1956 and 1959 such as asking the British to leave their naval and air bases in the country, nationalising the Colombo Harbour under the control of foreign companies, nationalising the private bus monopolies to make bus services more accessible to the rural population, and even the half-hearted Paddy Lands Bill designed to curtail exploitation by big landlords. This pattern repeated when the SLFP government (1960-65) nationalised the foreign oil companies, with the leader of the FP calling it unrighteous. The FP sided with the Christian and Catholic missionaries when in 1960 the government took over state assisted-schools, where the state paid the bills and the missionaries ran the schools. Notably, the state allowed the option for to the schools to go private, but without a mandatory fee from the children; and some of the leading schools took the option. Here the ACTC and the FP actually defended the Tamil elitist interest, since the Hindu schools in Jaffna and to a less extent Protestant Christian schools were bastions of Vellala elitism. Discriminatory practices denied the ‘untouchables’ access to education beyond primary school, and sometimes even to primary education. Nationalisation placed the management of schools in the public domain and, in fact, gave a boost to the educational aspirations of the socially backward.

Tamil nationalist hostility towards the local communists was extended to the Soviet Union and China. (Notably, it was the SLFP-led government of 1956-60 that established diplomatic relations with the socialist countries). When war broke out between China and India, the FP was even more vehement than the UNP in denouncing China as the aggressor, without examining the facts. Also, soon after the April 1971 insurrection by the JVP was put down, the FP joined the UNP to falsely accuse China of supporting the JVP. Hostility towards China has persisted among Tamil nationalists, many of whom still portray China (but not the US or Israel) as a friend of the Sinhala chauvinist state, besides being a threat to Indian interests in the region.

The Anti-Left Trend in Tamil Nationalism. The anti-left mindset of the FP relates to its class nature. Although the FP started as a populist alternative to the conservative ACTC, which it subdued in 1956, it inherited the mantle of the ACTC to serve the same Tamil elite class interests. Understandably, the Vietnam liberation struggle in the 1960s was seen as communist trouble making by the FP so that it denounced the struggle against caste oppression as a communist effort to make a Vietnam out of Jaffna.

Another line of thinking that has haunted Tamil nationalist thinking since around the time of the failed Satyagraha of 1961 and continues to do so even after turning to armed struggle against an oppressor backed by imperialism is the desire to emulate Israel. Some Tamil nationalists imagined parallels between the Tamils and Jews and drew inspiration from the Zionist forefathers of Israel. After 1977, however, a section of the youth recognised that valid parallels were with the Palestinians, and some Tamil militant groups even received combat training from the PLO from the late 1970s until the early 1980s, when the Indian establishment began to play godfather.

With the fading of the British Empire, the FP saw in the US its salvation, especially when the SLFP was in power, since the SLFP was in American eyes too close to the ‘reds’. Despite a strong feeling of kinship with India because of a shared cultural heritage and common language with Tamilnadu, there were reservations about India’s role since the Nehru clan was warm towards the Bandaranaikes, despite resentment of Sri Lankan neutrality in the Sino-Indian border dispute and Sri Lanka allowing Pakistani military aircraft to refuel in Colombo in the war preceding the formation of Bangladesh.

Although the FP at its foundation called itself socialist, with the exception of the Hartal of 1953, it never sided with the working classes against capitalism or imperialism. Another manifestation of this approach was that the FP consciously distanced itself from any form of struggle in the South for social justice, explaining its aloofness in terms of its limiting its interests to the Tamil cause. Thus it was no accident that R Sampanthan, later to become an important leader of the TULF, in his maiden speech in parliament in 1978 spoke approvingly of the policy of economic liberalisation announced by the UNP government. Sadly, this reactionary streak in Tamil nationalism has survived a quarter century of armed struggle against Sinhala chauvinism backed by US imperialism.

Other Significant Events and Trends. The economy of the Jaffna Peninsula, home to the majority of the Tamils, depended considerably on earnings from small trade and wages earned outside the peninsula, so much so that it used to be jovially referred to as a ‘money-order economy’. Employment in the police and the armed forces was relatively low. Systematic discrimination in state employment and education meant that Tamil presence in state jobs declined to levels far below the percentage population. Tamil recruitment to the armed forces became negligible since the 1960s and recruitment to the police declined to levels so low that by the 1970s in several police stations in the East it became very difficult to deal with the police in Tamil; this pattern extended to the North from the 1980s.

There was no significant state investment in industry in the North and East since the 1950s, in contrast to the large number of medium and large industries established in the South with state funding and foreign ‘aid’, and instances of investment in the East were such that they encouraged Sinhala settlement. Even after the UNP government declared its open economic policy in 1978, investment in the North and East was discouraged by the state, except where it fell in line with its chauvinist programme.

Economic tragedy in the North was averted by two developments in the 1970s. The government was compelled by balance of payments problems, partly due to the ‘Oil Crisis’ of the early 1970s, to restrict the import of non-essential goods and several items of agricultural produce such as chillies, potatoes and onions which could be grown locally. This boosted agricultural production in the Jaffna peninsula, where for the first time the agricultural small producers experienced a sense of well being. This also contributed to a thirst for land, and many people from the peninsula began to venture out to put to use land lying south of the peninsula. Thus, the Tamil population became politically aware of the problem of land as a result of economic reality rather than Tamil national awareness.

By this time the government was determined to contain Tamil settlements and the issue had become increasingly political. While Tamil settlers faced risks and threats on an increasing scale, illegal settlement of Sinhalese, often in strategically chosen locations with the backing of the armed forces and for clearly chauvinistic political reasons, proceeded unhindered alongside a growth in Sinhala population induced by expanding economic activity. The demographic shift in the East gained impetus under the Mahaweli Project, the largest single irrigation and hydropower scheme to be undertaken in the country, which was implemented in a way that Tamils were effectively excluded.

The second development also related to the ‘Oil Crisis’, and concerned employment in the Middle East. Tamils sought and secured employment in various service sectors and in the professions in the Middle East as well as in the growing economies of Africa. This was to be a mixed blessing: while on the one hand it provided badly needed economic relief, it had an adverse impact on the tradition of frugality and hard work in the North and, in the context of worsening relationship between the nationalities and distrust in the government, on the attitude of the middle class youth in what was essentially a conservative society.

With Tamil nationalism as the main resistance to the Sinhala chauvinist agenda, it was inevitable that the chauvinists transformed the Sinhala-Tamil contradiction into a hostile contradiction. However, until 1977, the government interfered, although not always with an adequate sense of responsibility, to ensure that the conflict did not escalate into ethnic war. The attitude of the UNP government elected in 1977 was different, and was provocatively confrontational from the outset.

Chauvinist Challenge to Other Nationalities. Although the Tamils had been the main target of Sinhala chauvinism since 1948, the Hill Country Tamils continued to be targeted ‘lawfully’ under the Sirima-Shastri Pact of 1964 and by the closing down of tea estates following nationalisation in 1974, and unlawfully by chauvinistic acts of violence including arson, forced expulsion from the estates and other misdeeds. The Hill Country Tamils have occasionally succeeded in resisting chauvinist aggression, but remain vulnerable to state sponsored moves to displace them: under the Mahaweli scheme in the early 1980s and more recently the Upper Kotmale Hydropower scheme and the resettlement of Sinhalese victims of natural disasters. Attacks against the Hill Country Tamils have escalated since the nationalisation of the tea estates and, since the escalation of the conflict in the North East, the linguistic affinity between the Tamils and the Hill Country Tamils is used by the security forces to harass and persecute Hill Country Tamils in the name of combating Tamil terrorism. Chauvinistic harassment and the failure of the Hill Country Tamil leadership to stand up for the people has driven a small number of Hill Country towards the LTTE, but not in significant numbers.

The Muslims in the East suffered as a result of acquisition of land by the state, colonisation and illegal settlements. In the West, there have, from time to time, been major acts of violence directed against the Muslim community starting with the police firing on Muslims in a mosque in Puttalam in 1976 up to the attack on Muslims in Dharga Town in 2006. Muslim businesses have been systematically targeted by chauvinistic organisations close to the Sihala Urumaya, now Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU). Sinhala chauvinist resentment of Muslims gathered new momentum following the often dubious benefit to the Muslims from employment in the Middle East, new trade opportunities, and aid from certain Arab countries.

The grievances of the Muslims and the demand of the Muslims for an autonomous region in the East are encouraged by a section of the chauvinists merely to weaken the Tamil demand for autonomy and to widen the rift between Tamil and Muslim communities. However, no opportunity is spared to make inroads into Muslim controlled businesses and territories. It should also be noted that a section of the Sinhala Buddhist elite has over the past two decades solicited the support of a section of the Tamil Hindu elite with affinity to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Indian saffron brigade to promote anti-Muslim and anti-Christian sentiments.

Class and Chauvinistic Politics. It is true that the petit bourgeois classes have been the main base for chauvinist electoral politics. The class interests served by the main chauvinist parties have, however, been those of the feudal-capitalist classes; and it was the rivalry between sections of this elite and their relationship to foreign capital that once marked the difference between the UNP and the SLFP and the nature of the alliances formed by them. The reactionary feudal-capitalist classes have continued to cynically manipulate nationalist sentiments to divide the people along ethnic lines, and have been encouraged by imperialism to do so. It is noteworthy that chauvinists and narrow nationalists who express strong sentiments about preserving traditional social values turn a blind eye to the adverse effects of imperialist globalisation on the various aspects of social life.

The old left through its opportunist alliance with the SLFP, initially for electoral advantage and subsequently for a share in state power, compromised its working class loyalty; and its corruption infected the affiliated trade unions. The rise of chauvinism also helped to divide the trade unions, especially the white collar unions, on ethnic lines. The political degeneration of left-dominated trade unions made it possible not only for the SLFP but also the UNP to make inroads into the trade union movement. Following the erosion of the electoral base of the old left, the JVP made its entry into white-collar trade unions and used a mix of chauvinist ideology and left slogans to expand its base. Thus the weakening of working class politics and the subjection of working class interests to electoral politics have contributed in no negligible way to the rise of chauvinism.

4. The National Question as War

The anti-Tamil pogrom of July 1983 marked the escalation of a conflict between the state and Tamil nationalists into war. There is reason to believe that this escalation of the national conflict was a well calculated strategy by the government to divert the attention of the Sinhala masses from economic issues, and in particular the plans to liberalise the economy, privatise state-controlled ventures and ‘reform’ social services in line with the dictates of the IMF, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank. Despite a steamroller majority for the government to pass any legislation at will and an executive presidency with virtually unlimited power, privatisation of services, especially education (provided free by the state from primary school to university) and health services (provided free by the state), and the removal of food and other subsidies would have met with strong public resistance. In fact, no previous government, including the UNP, dared to attack these institutions or to privatise any venture that had been nationalised.

Some argue that the change in economic conditions caused by the open economic policy led to the sharpening of the ethnic conflict. This argument seeks to deflect the blame for the transformation of the ethnic conflict into war away from the historic role of chauvinistic politics with successive governments pandering to chauvinism. It also inverts the sequence of things, since it was the escalation of the national contradiction that enabled the government to pass legislation that could be used to put down any form of popular resistance, and to beef up the armed forces. Not surprisingly, neither the repressive legislation nor the militarization of the state was a matter of concern to the imperialists.

Although the scale of the anti-Tamil violence of 1983 sent shock waves across the world because of unexpected media publicity, the imperialist countries (or the international community as they like to be called) did not bring pressure on the Sri Lankan government to resolve the national question or to protect the rights of the people. While Sri Lanka was ritually warned at various international forums about its violation of human and fundamental rights, the imperialists kept going their economic backing as well as military and strategic support for the government.

Build-up to the Showdown of 1987. Taking advantage of the climate of fear following the violence of 1983, the government diverted attention from its role in planning and executing the pogrom by proscribing the JVP, the Nava Samasamaja Party (NSSP) and the CP, and passed the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution making espousal, promotion, financing, encouraging or advocacy of the establishment of a separate state in Sri Lanka illegal, thus making it necessary for the TULF MPs to formally abandon their demand for Tamil Eelam to continue in parliament. Meantime, the Indian government on the one hand applied pressure on the Sri Lankan government to end the ethnic conflict and on the other wanted a major role for India in that matter. It should be noted that a considerable number of Tamil militants were already receiving combat training in India, and the number shot up after July 1983.

On the political front, talks initiated in December 1983 between the two countries led to an All-Party Conference on devolution of powers in January 1984 but the Sri Lankan government abandoned the proposals of the conference. The assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 October led to an apparent change in India’s approach to the Sri Lankan national question, but it is doubtful if the aims of the Indian establishment were altered by the event. The Indian establishment, besides taking the TULF under its wing, also patronised the five main Tamil liberation militant organisations (EROS, EPRLF, LTTE, PLOTE, and TELO) and a number of smaller organisations through its various agencies including the notorious Research and Analysis Wing (RAW); and guided their political strategy and to some extent their military strategy. Following the failure of the talks between Sri Lankan Tamil parties and the Sri Lankan government, held in Thimpu, Bhutan under Indian patronage, another Sri Lanka All-Party Conference was convened in June 1985 to resolve the ethnic crisis but got nowhere. The rival Tamil militants, while being covert beneficiaries of the largesse of the Indian establishment, also cultivated their Tamilnadu political patrons out of mutual interest. It was evident that by 1987, all but the LTTE and a few minor organisations, which for ideological reasons rejected Indian patronage, had surrendered their independence to their Indian patrons.

On the battlefront, Tamil militant activity escalated, with bomb explosions at the Meenambakkam Airport (August 1984), various locations in Colombo (October 1984), and in an Air Lanka aircraft at the Katunayake Airport (1986 May), and the shameful gunning down of 250 Sinhalese civilians in Anuradhapura (May 1985) with alleged logistic support from Indian undercover agents. While the GOSL armed forces continued to harass Tamils in the North and the East, militants continued with political assassinations, setting new precedents like the killing of two former TULF MPs in 1985, so that the targets, were no more restricted to ‘Tamil traitors’ or the enemy. Besides the killing of leading members and cadres of rival movements, dissent met with brutal response in the leading militant organisations. Indian patrons of the militants turned a blind eye to such events, and had been directly or indirectly responsible for several of the problems.

Organised violence targeting civilians began to escalate since 1984. In 1985 June, Sinhala chauvinists supported by the armed forces attacked Tamil villages in the Trincomalee District killing over 150 within two weeks; several hundred Tamil villages were destroyed and hundreds of Tamil civilians were killed in the months that followed. Tamil militants, in turn, killed Sinhalese civilians in large numbers. In April 1987, 128 Sinhalese bus passengers were cruelly massacred and another 50 injured on the Habarana-Trincomalee road. This was soon followed by a bomb explosion killing 113 persons and injuring more than 300 in Pettah, Colombo. Shortly afterwards, the government launched a massive military operation called ‘Operation Liberation’ at Vadamaratchi (the north eastern part of the Jaffna peninsula) to put an end to the dominance of the LTTE in Jaffna which was already suffering a blockade denying transport of goods to the peninsula.

The IPKF Misadventure. The subsequent turn of events was rapid, with the showdown between the two governments over sending essential supplies to the North culminating in the signing of the Indo-Lanka Peace Accord on 27th July 1987. The Indian government had obtained under duress the consent of the LTTE leader to abide by the accord and to disarm the LTTE, and lost no time to land the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) on Sri Lankan soil starting 30th July.

While most of the Tamils welcomed the accord, the Sinhalese had mixed feelings, based on the aspects concerning the national question. But there was more to the accord than that, and the less spoken parts of the Accord explicitly placed restrictions on Sri Lankan foreign and defence policy, asserting India’s position as the regional hegemon. The vast majority of the left and progressive forces in the South welcomed the Accord; and only the Left Communist Party, renamed the New Democratic Party (NDP) since, made a comprehensive criticism of the Accord and warned that it would not lead to the resolution of the national question but pave the way for Indian hegemony. Concerns about implications for the sovereignty of the country were expressed by Sirima Bandaranaike, the leader of the SLFP, whose civic rights had only been restored a year earlier by Jayawardane; but the main objection of the SLFP was to the setting up of provincial governments with a merged North-East province. There was dissent within the ranks of the UNP as well; but it was the chauvinistic JVP that was to make political capital of popular concerns.

Following the 13th amendment to the constitution that made provisions for the setting up Provincial Councils in November 1987, a bitter campaign was launched by the JVP, initially with the support of the SLFP, which was soon sidelined by the JVP. The campaign escalated into an insurrection accompanied by a hate campaign against everything Indian. The JVP used terror tactics to stall the functioning of the government; and R Premadasa, who was opposed to the Accord, was elected president in 1998 December, with covert support from the JVP. The JVP insurrection continued unabated and Premadasa used the anti-terrorism laws designed to put down Tamil separatists to combat the JVP. By late 1989, when the JVP’s campaign of destruction and terror was finally overcome by state terror, which annihilated all but one member of the politburo of the JVP, well over 60,000 persons, mostly Sinhala youth, had been killed or disappeared, mainly by the government forces. JVP killings included an estimated 6000 left and democratic political activists, including Vijaya Kumaranatunga (the husband of former President Chandrika Kumaratunga) who was a popular figure supporting the Accord, as well as several important UNP personalities. The leader of the NSSP, Vickramabahu Karunaratna was shot and critically wounded by a JVP attacker but saved by surgical intervention. It should be noted here that, in the north, leaders of NDP and the NSSP were issued death threats by Tamil militants, the LTTE in particular, following their effective campaign in support of Sirima Bandaranaike against Premadasa in the 1998 presidential election. The NDP leaders successfully evaded their potential assassins, but Annamalai, the leader of the Jaffna branch of the NSSP, was killed as were several left sympathisers.

The LTTE was deeply suspicious of Indian intentions and the Accord, and was readily provoked by the clumsy handling of a delicate situation by the Indian High Commission and the IPKF. With the GOSL armed forces in the South preoccupied with the JVP insurrection and the forces in the North and East confined to barracks, armed conflict erupted between the LTTE and the IPKF. The latter proved vulnerable to the guerrilla tactics of the LTTE; and the heavy-handed response of the IPKF and incidents of misconduct by IPKF personnel further antagonised the people. The net result was that the people of Jaffna suffered a severe loss of life and property and the IPKF lost many soldiers.

The EPRLF, a client of the Indian establishment, elected to power in the North East Provincial Government in October 1988 under dubious circumstances, acted in ways that alienated it from the people. In the end, abandoned by a defeated IPKF, opposed by a contemptuous Sri Lankan government, and cornered by a hostile LTTE, the EPRLF leadership made its last desperate bid for survival by unilaterally declaring the independence of Tamil Eelam in 1990, and fled the country in ignominy.

President Premadasa, known for his resentment of the Accord and the presence of the IPKF, backed the LTTE in its campaign against the IPKF and called for its withdrawal. With the JVP defeated in the South and the IPKF on the retreat in the North East, Premadasa demanded the withdrawal of the IPKF by the end of the 1989; the IPKF withdrew early next year, following the change of government in India. He took advantage of the unilateral declaration of the independence by the EPRLF government to take direct control of the Province.

The LTTE Takes Over. Undeniably, the Indo-Sri Lanka Peace Accord was the first comprehensive accord concerning the national question that any Sri Lankan government went some way towards implementing. However, the Accord itself was seriously flawed and addressed the national question merely as a Sinhala-Tamil problem and sought to assert Indian regional hegemonic interests. In drafting it, there was no consultation with the Tamils, especially the main Tamil militant force, the LTTE. In its implementation, the IPKF as well as the Indian High Commission showed little understanding of the underlying issues. Nor were they equipped to deal with the consequences of the Accord in a way that would help the resolution of the problem. Thus Sri Lanka was left with a worse problem than before the Accord.

As the IPKF retreated and finally withdrew, the LTTE moved in to take absolute control of much of the North and East. In 1990 February, for the first time, a Sri Lankan government held formal talks with Tamil militants. Although the relationship between the government and the LTTE was superficially warm, there was mutual distrust as well as the intention to undermine each other. This soon led to the second phase of war at a great cost to the lives and livelihood of the people in the North-East and to the country’s economy.

The LTTE made its biggest political blunder in antagonising the Muslims firstly by mass killings in the East and then expelling Muslims wholesale from the North. The erroneous approach towards the Muslims arose from a refusal to recognise a separate identity for the Muslims and the demand that the Muslims gave unqualified support to the Tamil militants in the same way that the Tamils had been conditioned to.

The killing of the leaders of the EPRLF (Pathmanabha faction) in Chennai and TULF leaders Amirthalingam and Yogeswaran in Colombo confirmed that the LTTE, like other leading Tamil militant movements, placed the gun in command. The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, denied to this day by the LTTE, dealt a severe blow to the LTTE support base in Tamilnadu, from which it has not quite recovered. It also made it politically expedient for the corrupt and opportunist DMK and ADMK dominating Tamilnadu politics to distance themselves from the LTTE as well as the demand for a separate Tamil Eelam.

From Talks for Peace to War for Peace. By 1992, dissent grew within the UNP government, and an elitist faction took the initiative to impeach the President for his undemocratic conduct of state affairs. The attempt failed and the dissenters left the UNP to form a rival party, whose leader Lalith Athulathmudali was shot dead, later alleged to be by forces loyal to Premadasa, during the parliamentary election campaign in 1991. This was quickly followed by the assassination of President Premadasa in May 1993 and the UNP presidential candidate Gamini Dissanayake the following year. Chandrika Kumaratunga, who returned to the fold of the SLFP in 1992 after splitting from it in the mid-80s to join the Sri Lanka Mahajana Pakshayaya (SLMP) founded by Vijaya Kumaranatunga, who promised an end to war and a peaceful resolution of the national question, was elected President with a 60% mandate by a war weary people.

The first few months of the Kumaratunga presidency raised hopes; but the sloppy handling of the negotiations with the LTTE led to an end to the unilateral ceasefire declared by the LTTE in 1994 following her election and fierce battles followed. In October 1995 the government drove the LTTE out of its stronghold in Jaffna, a virtual centre of parallel government. Under pressure from the LTTE, the people fled Jaffna to LTTE held areas, but many returned as the situation stabilised.

The turn of events led to reconciliation between the LTTE and the TULF, and the LTTE, having learnt from its tactical blunder in calling for a Tamil boycott of the elections in 1994 which allowed the EPDP (which splintered from the EPRLF) to secure a large number of seats in parliament with a handful of votes and thereby an important ministry which it used to build a base for itself in the North, decided to support, first indirectly and later more openly, a group dominated by the TULF (and named the Tamil National Alliance in 2001) in the elections that followed. The Tamil leaders who owed their parliamentary seats to the LTTE acted in consultation with it and endorsed the LTTE claim that it shall be the sole representative of the Tamils in peace negotiations. Thus, the TNA (now called the FP, because of complications caused by a split in the TNA), despite its inherent loyalty to the Indian establishment, was shunned by the latter who preferred Tamil politicians hostile to the LTTE, even when they had been rejected by the Tamils at the elections.

Attempts to introduce legislation through a devolution package submitted by President Kumaratunga to the Parliamentary Select Committee in 1996, aimed at addressing some of the main grievances of the Tamils. The package, owing to Sinhala chauvinist pressure from within the ruling alliance and outside, was already a severely watered down from what was conceived in 1994, and failed to please the Tamil leadership; and a bill to enable devolution of power presented in Parliament by Kumaratunga in August 2000 was withdrawn following unruly conduct by the UNP and other chauvinistic parties opposing it.

An ill-advised attack on the historic Temple of the Tooth in Kandy in 1998 by the LTTE led to a ban on the LTTE and a set-back for campaigners for peace. Escalation of the war by the government led to unprecedented loss of life, displacement of people and loss of home, property and livelihood. The initial territorial gains by the government were soon reversed and the subsequently the government lost more territory than it gained, including a major army camp in Mullaitivu and the strategically important Elephant Pass.

An attempt on the life of Kumaratunga, allegedly by the LTTE, on the eve of the presidential election in December 1999, helped her re-election. However, subsequent LTTE attacks on selected economic targets in the South hurt the economy and the popularity of the government, and forced Kumaratunga to seek the services of Norway, whose assistance she had used for monitoring ceasefire as early as 1995, to facilitate peace negotiations; but progress was slow owing to extreme chauvinist pressure. At the end of April 2000, the LTTE nearly overran the main army camp in Jaffna, but signals from India that it may intervene on the humanitarian pretext of saving the lives of Sri Lankan soldiers appear to have deterred the LTTE from fighting to the finish. Humiliating defeats of the government military campaigns up to 2001, termed the Orwellian-sounding ‘War for Peace’, led to the strengthening of the LTTE both militarily and politically.

Renewed Hopes for Peace. The destruction of half the fleet of SriLankan Airlines by suicide bombers in 2001 had a major impact, and political horse-trading by the UNP later in the year led to fresh elections, and a UNP-led United National Front (UNF) coalition government in December 2001. This was followed by rapid progress towards a ceasefire agreement (CFA) and a memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed early in 2002. Peace negotiations started in Thailand in September 2002 were followed by a second round in November, also in Thailand, and a third round in Norway in December, where the LTTE indicated willingness to consider a federal solution in place of its call for a separate state. Progress in subsequent meetings (Thailand, January 2003, Germany, February 2003 and Japan, March 2003) was poor owing to obstacles placed by the armed forces and the failure of the government to deliver on what had been agreed in the earlier meetings on matters including the resettlement of the displaced and rebuilding the war affected Tamil areas.

The process showed signs of stalling after the talks in Germany and ground to a halt after the meeting in Japan. The LTTE opted out of the talks indefinitely, and rejected three successive proposals by the government for the resumption of talks on the grounds that they were inadequate to deal with the issues concerned, and put forward in June 2003 a comprehensive proposal for an interim self-governing authority (ISGA) for the North-East as a step towards solving the national question.

End of the Road for Peace Talks. President Kumaratunga took advantage of the impasse in which the UNF government found itself following the ISGA proposal from the LTTE, and exercised her executive powers to take crucial ministries directly under her to render ineffective the peace process. After dismissing a politically weakened UNF government and dissolving parliament, Kumaratunga consented to an opportunistic alliance, the Sandanaya, between the PA and the JVP, which came to power in April 2004 at a price to the PA, and more to the prospects for peace.

Despite the lack of progress in solving the national question and the failure to restore normal life in war affected regions, the cessation of hostilities between the armed forces and the LTTE gave the people of the North-East a badly needed respite, which lasted nearly four years since the unilateral declaration of ceasefire by the LTTE in 2001. But moves behind the scene to undermine the CFA involved a range of subversive activities like the attack on a Chinese vessel some distance outside what the LTTE claimed to be its territorial waters, inciting clashes between Tamils and Muslims with the connivance of certain Muslim political leaders, and even more cynically engineering a split in the ranks of the LTTE. It was revealed at the time of the presidential election in 2005 that the groundwork for the split that occurred in March 2004 was carried out by US undercover agents, on the request of the leader of the UNP during the peace talks, in which Karuna, the leader of the Eastern Command of the LTTE was a participant. Karuna’s group (now called the TMVP), although militarily defeated by the LTTE, was with the help of the Sri Lankan armed forces able to make life difficult for the LTTE by killing leaders and members of the LTTE in the East, as well as Tamil politicians sympathetic to the LTTE.

The prospects for peace received another blow with the tsunami of 26th December 2004. The North and East and the South were badly hit and Mullaitivu in the north east of the island where the LTTE naval base is located was one of the worst hit areas. The partiality of the government in distributing international relief to the refugees and, besides deliberate neglect, obstruction by the armed forces of the transport of essential supplies to affected areas under LTTE control was a bad sign. Partly under international pressure, President Kumaratunga agreed to set up the P-TOMS (Post-Tsunami Operational Management Structure) by which the government and LTTE would cooperate to provide essential relief to the tsunami victims in LTTE-controlled areas. The JVP initiated a mass campaign against the P-TOMS and sealed its fate by securing a court ruling, based on legal technicalities, against its implementation.

Towards an Undeclared War. Meantime, chauvinists opposed to the peace process saw in the split in the LTTE, and the impact of the tsunami on the economy in LTTE controlled areas and on the military capability of the LTTE, a golden opportunity to finish off the LTTE. Such thinking had its adherents in high places in the armed forces as well as among leaders of the ruling party. Escalation of the conflict thus seemed inevitable.

The election of Mahinda Rajapaksha in November 2005 was aided by a last-minute call by LTTE for a boycott of the presidential election. A politically more meaningful call by the NDP several weeks before the election, asking the people of the North East to spoil their ballot papers, was not even considered by the LTTE. It has been recently alleged that the LTTE was bribed to call for the boycott by a member of the Rajapaksha clan. While the charge against the LTTE is serious and if true a betrayal of the trust of the Tamil people, it is doubtful whether the prospects for peace would have been different in substance if the UNP candidate was elected president.

India had banned the LTTE in 1991 following information linking the LTTE to the assassination of Rajeev Gandhi. The Kumaratunga government claimed credit for the US ban in 1997 and the UK ban in 2001. Canada banned the LTTE in 2006, and the ban by the EU in May 2006 was under pressure from the US applied through the UK. It seems likely that these steps against the LTTE were taken to serve the interests of the countries concerned and, if otherwise, the interests of the US; but by no means to satisfy the Sri Lankan government. The ban by the EU instead of making the LTTE more flexible in its approach, as anticipated by the advocates of the ban, hardened its attitude, while the Sri Lankan government appeared to see the ban as licence to destroy at will. The EU ban also had an adverse effect on the performance of the ceasefire monitoring mission set-up under the CFA, and the ceasefire agreement is observed only in its breach.

From the outset President Rajapaksha showed little interest in initiating talks, and used objections from his chauvinistic allies, the JVP and the JHU, as excuses for creating obstacles to a peaceful resolution of the conflict with the LTTE. Talks were arranged in 2006 by the Norwegian intermediaries with great difficulty, the first in Geneva and the next in Oslo. The escalation of violence, the violation of the CFA and support for the TMVP paramilitaries from the armed forces of the GOSL to carry out attacks against the LTTE became the central issues. The talks came to naught because the government failed to honour agreements reached in the Geneva round on the question of the paramilitaries. The Oslo round was doomed to fail even before it started because of endless disputes that preceded it on matters like transport which would have been minor issues only a year earlier.

A War by Any Other Name. An attempt on the life of the Army Commander Sarath Fonseka in April 2006 served as the pretext for a series of bombing raids and dispute over a waterway in the East led to an escalation of the conflict. The LTTE has been held responsible for anti-personnel mine attacks on the armed forces, the use of suicide bombers against senior personnel of the armed forces and politicians, killing leading political opponents, and fatal attacks on innocent Sinhala civilians who had little to do with the conflict. Killings, kidnappings and threats became part of everyday life and the targets included not only members and supporters of LTTE and those hostile to LTTE, but also other civilians. The government forces have used every alleged LTTE attack as pretext for retaliation, mostly against civilians, in the locality following minor skirmishes with the LTTE and whole communities on other occasions. Since mid-2006 people living in LTTE-controlled areas in the East have been driven out by indiscriminate bombing raids by Israeli-built K’fir aircraft and MIG fighters, and artillery and multi-barrel rocket launcher (MBRL) attacks against civilian targets, although claimed to be strategic LTTE targets. Sixteen months of the Rajapaksha presidency has steered the country into an undeclared war and unprecedented mass destruction across the North and East. This is accompanied by a political climate marked by an unending spate of acts of extortion, kidnapping, disappearing, death threats and murder, many of which take place in broad daylight not only in the troubled North East but also in Colombo. Often the armed forces and the police have been indicted as accomplices by neutral observers. The victims until recently were only Tamils. But now there is evidence of political targeting of Sinhalese who are outspoken critics of the war.

Since the middle of 2006, the Batticaloa district in the East has become a massive refuge camp. Some 200,000 or more were added in March-April 2007 to the number of internally displaced persons in the North East, owing to intense bombing and shelling by the Sri Lankan armed forces in a bid to drive the LTTE out of its strongholds.

The LTTE, while it has lost direct control of much of its territory in the East as a result of attacks by the government forces, seems to have made a strategic retreat with the intention of regrouping and reverting to guerrilla warfare. It has shown its capability for surprise attacks in its attack on a Sri Lankan Navy convoy in 2006, an attack by sea on the Galle Harbour, and the recent air strikes on the Air Force base at Katunayake, the army base in the North and fuel tanks north of Colombo using light aircraft. While the LTTE is not equipped to score a military victory, its attacks have called into question the defence capability of the armed forces and had a major adverse impact on a struggling economy.

Today the ceasefire is a shambles and exists only on paper and desperate attempts to revive it and restart peace talks are unlikely to succeed in the current political climate. A worrying new development in recent months is that attacks on media personnel and political personalities have been extended to the Sinhala community as well. This is seen as a concerted effort to silence by a variety of means all political opposition to the Sinhala chauvinist agenda and to the domination of a newly emergent junta.

The country is in an impasse on the national question, and the democratic and fundamental rights of an increasingly wider section of the population are under threat. Substituting one president with another or one chauvinistic government with another will not resolve the national question or the increasingly worrying plight of democracy and human rights.

Therefore, to find a way out of the current crisis, it is important to understand the approaches of the important players to the national question as well as the broader political issues that cannot any more be separated from the national question. The next section identifies the players in terms of the social group interests that they seek to represent, their ideology, and approach to the national question. The respective roles of important external players are also identified and commented upon.

(TO BE CONCLUDED)

S Sivasegaram is a prominent Tamil poet, activist and scientist from Sri Lanka.

Pranab Kanti Basu

The Myth

There is a wonderful sentiment warming the hearts of global intelligentsia. It is the glorious feeling that we have attained the age of the empire without an emperor, that it is truly the age of globalisation where empire does not imply the exercise of the sovereignty of one state over another. With the triumph of globalised capital the whole world has accepted the economic, moral and ethical supremacy of a homogeneous world order based prominently on individualism and the ethics of the market. The days of fighting the imperialist centre and its camp followers are over. So the proper strategy of the down and out should be to accept the empire and seek to end the discriminatory practices of empire operating to their disadvantage. The workers, for example, who are confined by various laws and regulations within the bounds of a nation state, should demand global citizenship.

This feeling of international fraternity persists among the intellectuals in spite of the genocide being perpetrated by the defenders of the faith, in spite of terrible racial and religious killings all around the world. This faith is understandable. The global intellectuals, the diaspora or the semi diasporic elements have never been so globally mobile before – the third world intellectuals peddling their differences from the first world and the first world intellectuals peddling their sympathy and patronage are having it good like never before. Perhaps another reason for their rhapsodies about the world order is that with the ascendancy of global capital there has been a homogenisation of ruling cultures like never before. This in turn has led to the homogenisation of curriculum across nations, particularly in the field of higher education. This has opened up the accessibility of the global educator’s market – with the attendant magical amounts of forex earnings for the savvy intellectuals.

The Reality

Just a little cautious look at what is happening around shows up the claims of a global order for what it is – a part of the ideological apparatus of global capital. The various versions of this vision reinforce the feeling of inevitability of the order of global capital that has percolated all the capillaries of our existence. Let us note in passing that one of the co-authors of the book that really sold this idea globally (becoming a global best seller in the process) has long been an icon of anti-capitalist militancy and radicalism in many circles (Negri and Hardt, 2000). This is not to ridicule the integrity of the man, but to highlight the fact that the leftists have also quietly conceded the inevitability of the triumph of global capital and hence of the need to think of strategies of coexistence and compromise rather than of counter hegemonic practice and confrontation.

The focus of this article is on thinking counter hegemonic practices/strategies and also simultaneously thinking of the reasons for the failure of the Marxist parties to think of alternatives.

The Theory

Marx’s story of the rise of capitalism belongs to the pantheon of modernist teleological constructs of history. At the end of the route we are left with two fundamental contending classes – the working class and the capitalist class. So either we sign off and say ‘this is the end of history’, or we construct a vision of the future based on the aspirations of the constructed working class. The problem with the revolutionary vision of the future society (i.e. the latter vision) is that it can only grow out of the capitalist order. Apart from the fact that this entails the espousal of the cause of imposing capitalist development in less developed areas (which is the crux of the problem relating to seizure of agricultural land for the capitalists by the leftist state government in West Bengal) this vision is necessarily based on the acceptance of the self centred modernity of the capitalist order out of which, only, it can grow through a process of dialectical supercession. Hence it necessarily denigrates community and locality, which, to my mind, must be the fundamental pillars of any future society that can overcome the horrors of the current era of global capitalist domination.

This is not any original idea (even if one has the audacity of subscribing to the notion of originality in this post modern age). Revolutionaries like Mao, Gramsci, and nearer home Shankar Guha Neogi have propounded this. Clearly their communitarian and locality based visions conflicted with the ‘pure’ Marxist vision. But they never spelt out their theoretical differences with the Marxist vision of counter hegemonic practice. Perhaps, among other reasons, the need for maintaining class solidarity by leaving the iconic value of Marx undisturbed was an important reason. India also has a rich tradition of rural communitarians like Gandhi and Tagore. I do believe that we should seriously evaluate Gandhi’s vision of Swaraj and Tagore’s vision of Swadesh andSamabay. Their seminal contributions raise two problems, which require independent evaluation not possible within the span of this enquiry. Gandhi’s blindness to the social inequity in the caste system is a fundamental lacuna of his thought that has to be properly evaluated, digging out the limitations that it causes in other areas of his vision. Besides, both Gandhi and Tagore’s silence or utopian thought about the relation of the community to the state has to be properly problematised. Though we recognise the significance of the views of the rural communitarians, our entry point is Marx’s discussion of capitalism, particularly of primitive capital accumulation (PCA).

Globalisation, Primitive Capital Accumulation and Marxism

I had suggested elsewhere (Basu, 2007) that globalisation can be analytically viewed as the era when rent extraction, inevitably relying on PCA, has become the predominant means of extraction of surplus by large capital, which is global. I had suggested that global capital not only extracts rent through acquisition of property rights over land and other natural resources, but it also extracts rent on the basis of acquisition of sole rights to knowledge and markets, and through the imposition of immobility on labour. All these it manages through various international laws and regulations. One could club all these uses of the discriminatory powers derived from the same legal framework that is deemed by the faithful to be non-discriminatory, and so impersonal, under the common theoretical rubric of PCA without violence to the fundamental theoretical propositions of Marx.

This homogeneous treatment of various aspects of surplus extraction by global capital is important because it revalues the role of the state, which had been totally stripped of significance by the myth of empire without emperor. The state is necessary for creating and enforcing the system of laws and regulations that are proper to the extraction of surplus by these means. A hierarchy of states, with the north-south division intact, is also necessary to cook up and impose worldwide the discriminatory systems of property rights and immobilities that are constantly evolving to suit the needs of global capital in the changing social and technological environment. At the same time this homogeneous treatment reduces the significance of space, of territory, and of communities based on these localities. I will here attempt to deconstruct an elementary aspect of PCA – use value – and in the process to explore the specificity of spaces. This will reiterate some of the aspects of the counter hegemonic practices that I had mentioned in my earlier paper and also give it some more depth.

Capital is the agency of transformation of direct heterogeneous social relations between humans into homogeneous relations mediated through commodity exchange. But at the core of the homogenisation/alienation lies the process of commoditisation. Failure to give proper thought to the process of commoditisation closes many counter hegemonic options that are of particular value particularly in the age of globalisation. Though this is not a necessary assumption, the process of PCA as narrated in Capital starts from the petty production economic. This comes through clearly in the course of the discussions on the relation between use value and exchange value. There is a very interesting discussion of this issue by Spivak (Spivak, 1987). There she comments that Marx does not apparently realise that the category of use value, which he treats as an originary, natural category, is actually shot through with the unnaturalness of exchange values. This of course conforms to the general tenure of the postmodern critique, whish firmly refuses to admit any pure or natural, precultural category. To us this critique is not important as a species of postmodern themes. Its importance lies in the fact that it indicates, though it does not elaborate, the possibility of locating a lacuna of alienation in the category of use value as it is explicated in Capital, rather than limiting the analytical/rhetorical force of alienation to the category of exchange value.

Let us elaborate this position with a textual example. Consider the discussion on the commodity circuits. Before the intervention of money we have the circuit C-C.  Let us assume that before exchange takes place the owners of C-C are, respectively, X and Y. As the discussion in Capital (Marx, 1954) goes, to X the first C is exchange value while the second is use value. Conversely to Y the first C is use value while the last C is exchange value. The implication that is of fundamental importance is that use value is understood as purely personal or subjective. It has not the burden of cultural or social values. In fact the standard critique of neoclassical theory used to harp on the fact that while the classical economists explained prices in terms of the material, socially determined cost factors, the neoclassical theorists explained prices purely in terms of subjective ahistorical utility. (Dobb, 1973). The question of social determination of use values has sometimes crept in as an eclectic criticism but in a purely negative sense: it has been pointed out, and quite correctly, that utility is not a matter of individual preferences but is managed through propaganda for the benefit of capitalist sales. Our concern is with the positive or unmanageable sense of depending on some common non-individualistic ground. The intervention of capital in this narrative of the circuits of commodities follows only after the introduction of money. Let us briefly trace the sequence.

From C-C we go to C-M-C. Money enters as a repository of exchange value, but only as a vanishing moment. But money does not simply drop out of the circuit. So someone holds it purely as a repository of exchange value. But why should anyone want to hold exchange value? That is C-M-C leads to C-M-C-M…. So we have both C-M-C and M-C-M. What is the objective of the second type of circuit? See when X gives up a ‘C’ to get another ‘C’, the act is understandable because what one gives up is qualitatively different from what one acquires. But what about the circuit M-C-M? The ‘M’ at the beginning and the ‘M’ at the end are not qualitatively different. So what is the point of this exchange? The answer that Marx provides is that the two Ms are quantitatively different and hence the exchange. So we have the motive of accumulation. M-C-M to M-C-M‘. And M‘>M. But how does that happen in a world where all commodities sell at their values? Where does the excess come from? This brings in capitalist class process with labour power commodity. This is the only part of the inputs purchased by the capitalist that adds more value to the produced goods than its own value. Value of a commodity is the abstract labour required for the production of that commodity. The inputs like raw materials, fuel etc. have already been produced. So an invariant quantity of abstract or undifferentiated labour has already been embodied in them, which they add to the value of the commodity in whose production they are used. Live or direct labour that is employed, on the other hand, adds more value in the course of its consumption in the process of production than what is required for its own reproduction. In plain terms this means that if a worker works for 8 hours in the factory than the commodities that the worker requires for sustaining this effort require less than 8 hours of labour for their production. This is surplus value, which sources the quantitative addition that leads to M‘ being more than M. so the circuit is represented a M-C-C‘-M‘. C is the value of the inputs purchased including labour power, M is its monetary value, C‘ is the expanded value including surplus value, M‘ is the monetary value of C‘. The intervention of money capital, the birth of the labour power commodity leading to the genesis of surplus value that is appropriated as profit (M‘-M), generates another level of alienation. Let us see the difference in the two levels of differentiation and their implication for our vision of possible counter hegemonic strategies.

The two stages of alienation, as I see it (and which is also implicit in the deconstruction of the category of use value by Spivak) are, first, the stage of commoditisation of product and, second, the stage of alienation of labour power as commodity. Commoditisation necessarily involves the insertion of the category of subjective use value. In plain language this means that commodity exchange implies and is implied by release of production from social or community control on what should be produced and on the distribution of social production. It is only then that the product can appear as a use value to the buyer as an individual. So, in the initial commodity circuit that we have discussed the first ‘C’ is a use value to Y, not to X; and the second ‘C’ is a use value to X but not to Y. This is the birth of individuality as opposed to community, which must inevitably, i.e. logically lead to the capitalist mode of production. This would be inconceivable in a social system in which both X and Y are mutually concerned about each other because of a certain social bindings. In this sense Spivak deconstructs the category of use value to show that it too is shot through and through with the guilt of exchange value.

The second stage of alienation has received a lot of attention in Marxist literature. The labourer who has lost possession of all alienable means of production (i.e. all means of production that can be taken away from the labouring person without causing loss of life) is left with the possession of the only inalienable means of production – the power to labour, which is reproduced with each reproduction of the life force of the worker. The labourer is forced to sell labour power for a livelihood. Unlike other commodities the seller of this commodity has to enter the work place to supply labour power as required by the owner of the factory – the capitalist. So the buyer of labour power commands and the seller obeys. This robs the labourer of the means of realising selfhood in work, which is the differentia of human labour. So the labourer is alienated from his labour.

In my previous treatment of PCA, to which I have already referred, I had not looked critically at the first moment of capital formation, viz. the process of commoditisation. The violation of the community is an essential moment in the development of the capitalist mode of production. Its significance is blurred if one concentrates only on the second moment of PCA, which is highlighted in Capital. Once we appreciate the significance of the destruction of community modes of existence for the development of capital a possible counter hegemonic strategy suggests itself. Thinking, producing, living in a community mode can evolve an effective opposition to global capital. This also points to a specificity of space that becomes blurred when one extends the theoretical scope of PCA to understand the entirety of rent extraction by global capital. Space is the field in which the locality is embedded. We are not going into the question of how far it is possible to treat spaces just as geographical territories.

How Things Hang Together

One can try to see how the events that are currently of great concern to all ‘liberal and/or left’ thinking individuals fit into the scheme of analysis that we have outlined. We will try to build upon that analysis to show that the oppositional forces have to be much more discriminatory in their approach to both the question of who are the friends as well as to the question of what should be a meaningful oppositional strategy. Let us specifically concentrate on what has become the focal point of protest against global capital in India – the seizure of agricultural and forest land for alternate use. This would include all kinds of alternative uses like land for building large dams, SEZs, ‘chemical hubs’, for realty business and so on.

There are two major issues that come through in what the protestors are saying: that compensation has not been properly evaluated and that those who will lose their land have not been taken into confidence. This, of course, apart from widespread indignation at the reign of terror that has been unleashed on unwilling refugees and protestors by the ruling parties, their henchmen, and the police in the states where such acquisition has met with resistance. The latter can be understood from a purely bourgeois liberal position also. That is, taking account of bourgeois forgetfulness. The story of dispossession of agricultural and forest dependent communities from land is nothing new. This phase of PCA is well documented in Capital. In fact the more intelligent supporters of the left front government’s policy of land acquisition are delivering learned lectures where they point out the fact that the process of dispossession and consequent impoverishment of the labouring people stretched over a period of more than one and a half centuries in England (and look where England is today!). But once this was completed such obvious state coercion was to be limited to the periphery of capitalist development. So the bourgeois liberal could afford to forget the gory past of capital’s ‘original’ homeland and be critical of the violation of bourgeois rights and legal procedures in the course of land acquisition in India. Violation of the bourgeois legal rights enshrined in law and codes of justice, particularly by the state and those in power, have to be strongly resisted both because they violate the innate right to life and livelihood and also because in the absence of such ‘democratic rights’ it becomes more difficult to organise for an alternative. But though this resistance is of utmost importance, this cannot constitute any counter hegemonic strategy, per se. That is precisely the reason why political parties that subscribe to the strategy of development under the aegis of global capital find no difficulty in joining such protests in regions where they are not in power. Observe for example the CPIM in Orissa or Haryana, as well as the TMC in West Bengal.

From the long-term perspective the questions of ‘proper’ evaluation of compensation and of participation of the possessors of land in the process of reallocation of land to other uses require serious theoretical consideration if any sustained resistance is to evolve. It is in this context that the images of two moments of alienation become important.

It is worthwhile to remember, as I have pointed out earlier, that the process of PCA is not primitive in the sense of prior in time to capitalist accumulation (Basu, 2007). It is always intertwined with capital’s expansion. Capital has to find ways and means of affecting PCA in newer pastures to maintain its capability to expand. For example, it is currently engaged in searching routes to PCA in fields like knowledge, information and even in areas that until recently used to be considered processes that are part and parcel of life process like cultural activities and even the games that people play. Recall that the process of PCA in any new field will involve the two moments of commoditisation and subordination to capital.

The first moment of PCA, viz. commoditisation is also the first moment of alienation in the sense of severance of community linkages. This provides the key to understanding the controversy over what constitutes ‘proper compensation’. When use values are not just subjective but conditioned by community norms, the concept of propriety of compensation itself comes to be questioned. It is not simply a question of calculation (of the proper compensation) but a question of whether and under what circumstances it is ‘proper’ to transfer a resource from one activity to another. This leads to a question that is important from the point of view of governance. This also questions the claim of unquestioned dominance of a single, defined ethics in this Age of Empire. From the community’s perspective, the answer to the question of whether land can at all be reduced to an exchange value (which is always homogeneous, so comparable with other use values) erasing its common use value, can only be sought through a mode of decision making that allows direct participation of the community.

To appreciate the analytical scope of this twist to the concept of PCA let us go to a field far removed from land acquisition. At the time when a furious debate was raging regarding the various issues raised by the Uruguay round of negations of GATT, the Head of the department of mathematics of a leading US university (I have forgotten the name) made a very perceptive comment to the effect that if the proposed patent regime was implemented then the individual scientist would be richer but science would be poorer. In our scheme the reference is to the first alienation in the process of PCA. At this moment knowledge ceases to remain a common property and becomes private property. As common property the use value of knowledge is determined by the ‘needs’ of the community. These needs would include, apart from the requirement of solving the problems emanating from production, the intellectual pleasure of the pursuit of knowledge. Once knowledge becomes a private property it is simply exchange value to the individual who develops it. It is use value to the one who buys it. But what is this use value? Presumably a firm will pay for the patent rights to this knowledge. The firm invests in this acquisition only because it speculates that this is a profitable venture. So use value and exchange value become strangely inseparable, vindicating an inaugural insight of Spivak. Before the enforcement of patent rights knowledge communication and development were linked to, among other things, the common human urge to ‘know’. The easy dissemination of knowledge is a condition for the fulfilment of this urge in society at large. At the same time common participation in the development of knowledge would itself restrain the development of knowledge along lines that are harmful to humanity. At the next stage of PCA, which the professor did not elaborate, the wherewithal to develop this private property – knowledge – would be concentrated in the hands of capital. At this moment the individual scientist would be a paid employee, with no rights to his/her inventions.

Before we go on to outline what could be the elements of a counter hegemonic strategy in this context let us try to deal with an of the obvious fallacy of our analysis. Knowledge pursuit that is not ordered by the rules of private property could be differently constrained but could similarly constrict the knowledge horizons of society. This is what the history of science in the West teaches us. We are not talking of such a common property rights to knowledge. So the community that we are talking of is itself an object of struggle, an ideal. Then are we not violating the tenets of the position from which we gained our initial theoretical insight – postmodernism? We plead guilty. Postmodernism can provide the tools for debunking a theory but it cannot provide a basis for counter hegemonic practice. To this manner of argumentation there is no hierarchy. Difference and mutual constitutivity is all. So we have to move out of its constraints – vulgarise it so to say. So the kind of commonality that lies at the base of our concept of common property in knowledge is one without hierarchy and so without power discrimination. This leads directly to the question of counter hegemonic strategy. The development of knowledge and the construction of this knowledge community must proceed simultaneously. Counter hegemonic practice will consist of this simultaneous struggle. It could consist of subversive strategies, but more importantly it will consist of the development of new technologies, of rules of knowledge dissemination that further community rights in knowledge. There are already attempts by concerned seekers to form communities where knowledge and information can be exchanged without the mediation of commodities. We can similarly imagine other communities that will circumvent the commodity nexus in say the field of games, art, etc. These communities will not initially be interlinked. One could be part of a knowledge community and at the same time belong to the capital-commodity order that runs the spectacle called games.

Fundamentally in all spheres one must try to revitalise the community content of use value at the cost of the subjective, individual use values. There must be a simultaneous effort to construct a community within which this sense can be nurtured. There are various examples of efforts in this direction. The ongoing experiments with the Shramajibi haspataals are a step in this direction. These efforts have a lot in common with the attempts of many rural communitarians like Tagore in the pre-independence period. The essence of Tagore’s teachings in this regard was that the most pernicious effect of the coming of the British was that the population became dependent on the benevolence of the state like never before. Before the British invasion Indian rural community was unique in its autonomy from central authority. They managed their productive, social and legal problems on their own. The British changed all that and made the people on the state to tackle their every problem. So the principle requirement for the rejuvenation of the country was to begin its economic revival without the assistance of the state. For this a dedicated cooperative movement (Samabay) had to be built and sustained.

The attitude to the state, what could be the principles of law and property appropriate to such orders, all these and many related questions will have to be solved in the course of the movement to revive or create these cooperatives. There will of course be unavoidable clashes with state power. But the difference with what is taught as an axiom by Marxist parties that have not been subjugated by the ruling commodity culture is clear. The movement must not be organised with the sole objective of capturing state power – rather the objective must be one of construction of state power from the grass root, struggle to construct alternate modes of common property and their utilisation.

Signing off

These are very tentative suggestions so the question of reaching a conclusion does not arise. The principle objective of this piece was to search for the theoretical building blocks that can be used for construction of a counter hegemonic strategy. I believe that unless we can clarify our theoretical perspectives movements like those that are resisting the government’s efforts to grab land are likely to be misappropriated. And I am not talking of conscious subversive take over – that is a simple fact that can be effectively handled. I am talking of an unconscious derailment of such movements faced with the absence of a destination.

References

Basu, 2007. Basu, P.K. “Political Economy of Land Grab”. Economic and Political Weekly, April 7-13, 2007.

Dobb, 1973. Dobb, M. Theories of Value and Distribution since Adam Smith. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1973.

Marx, 1954. Marx, K. Capital Vol. I. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1954. reprint, 1974.

Negri and Hardt, 2000. Negri, A. and M. Hardt. Empire. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2000.

Spivak, 1987. Spivak, G. “Speculations on reading Marx after Reading Derrida”. In Post Structuralism and the Question of History. Ed. Attridge, Derrick, et. al. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987.

An interview with Coni Ledesma, International Spokesperson of Makibaka, Filipino Revolutionary Women’s Association

E. San Juan, Jr.

May 14, election day in the Philippines, may signal a historic turning-point in its political devolution since the February 1986 “people power” revolt overthrew the U.S.-backed Marcos dictatorship. The prospect is grim. Either the country declines into unprecedented barbarism – so far, international monitors (Amnesty International, World Council of Churches, UN investigators) have documented thousands of victims of extra-judicial killings, forcible “disappearances,” torture and massacres exceeding those committed by Marcos – or President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is impeached by a majority of elected representatives for treason, violation of the Constitution, corruption, etc. This may temporarily stop the “impunity” for State-affiliated criminals. This legal route of redress of grievances is by no means a revolution; it can be aptly described as an in-house purging of decay and rot. Either way, this ritualized election of local officials and Congresspeople will prove a veritable test-case for the country’s neocolonial, oligarchic institutions and the status quo of class inequality that have been, in one way or another, fostered by the United States, its former colonizer, for over a century now.

Elections in the Philippines, designed by the U.S. colonial government, began as a way of preserving the power of the moneyed, privileged elite within a monopolized party system offered as an alternative to armed resistance by Filipinos. Since formal independence in 1946, the elite bloc of landlords, compradors and bureaucrat-capitalists has partitioned power among their ranks, with personalities overshadowing any ideological differences, if any. Any progressive, radical challenge to elite hegemony, such as that posed by Claro Recto and Lorenzo Tanada in the fifties, or by the progressive party-list today (among them, BAYAN MUNA, ANAKPAWIS, GABRIELA, KABATAAN, MIGRANTE), has been stigmatized as “communist” or “terrorist.”  Just as in many “third world” dependent societies characterized by flagrant class conflict, electoral democracy in the Philippines has been distinguished by large-scale bribery of voters, corruption of officials, systematic violence-this time with the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the national police engaged in campaigning for the incumbent administration. The question of legitimacy or accountability is thus decided by the old formula of  “guns, goons and gold.”

Fraud as Spectacle and Testimony

In a recent commentary, the Center for People Empowerment in Governance, a think-tank based at the University of the Philippines, concludes that “fraud is an endemic disease that has been institutionalized by a political system-the government, executive and legislative structures, political parties-that remains dominated by political dynasties” (Issue Analysis, No. 7, May 2007). A week ago, a group of retired military and police officers revealed a devious plan of Arroyo’s adviser, General Hermogenes Esperon, AFP Chief, to hijack 14 million votes in 4 regions and 12 provinces to insure the victory of Arroyo’s team.

It is instructive to cite here a recent Social Weather Station survey of citizens’ attitudes to the coming elections. The survey found that 40% of Filipinos expect the government will cheat, while 69% believe that the votes will be stolen by the Arroyo regime through “flying voters,” coercion and other means used during Arroyo’s election in 2004 in which the officials of the State’s Commission on Elections (COMELEC) manipulated the counting of votes in Arroyo’s favor. Arroyo unwittingly admitted her fraudulent tenure in the widely publicized “Hello Garci” phone expose.

During the Cold War, the Philippines was touted as a “showcase” of U.S.-style democracy in Asia. Elected politicians toed Washington’s “free world” party line. With the help of the CIA and the Pentagon-supervised and -trained AFP, a surrogate army of U.S. finance capital, the puppet president Ramon Magsaysay defeated the Communist-led Huk uprising in the fifties. Today the Philippines is hailed as the second “battlefront” in George W. Bush’s “global war on terror.” The U.S. State Department has labeled the 38-year-old insurgent New People’s Army (led by the Communist Party of the Philippines) as a “terrorist” organization, along with the CIA-built and AFP-coddled Abu Sayyaf bandit-group. While the country in the fifties was barely recovering from the enormous devastation of World War II, today, the economy is in shambles: 80% of 87 million Filipinos are struggling to survive on $2 a day, below decent living standards, while 46 million Filipinos do not even meet their 100% dietary energy requirement (IBON Media Release, 4 April 2007).

Scourge of the Nation

Just like her predecessors, Arroyo has sacrificed the Filipino people’s welfare by implementing neoliberal globalization policies (privatization, deregulation) imposed by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization. The result is a humanitarian disaster. Filipino economist Alejandro Lichauco has documented unprecedented mass hunger throughout the country in his book Hunger, Corruption and Betrayal(Manila, 2005). Three thousand Filipinos leave every day to join 10 million Filipinos working in hundreds of countries around the world, remitting $12 billion to keep the economy afloat-indubitable proof that the Philippines has plunged from relative prosperity in the fifties to the wretched “basket-case” of Asia in this new millennium of global capitalism.

Meanwhile, the elite desperately clings to power by consumerist propaganda and violence. So ruthless is the carnage in the “killing fields” of the Philippines that it has alarmed some U.S. lawmakers, among them Senator Barbara Boxer and recently Congresswomen Ellen Tauscher (Inquirer.net, April 26, 2007) who urged Arroyo to prevent more murders of left-wing political activists by “prosecuting those responsible for the crimes.” The US Senate Foreign Relations committee is inquiring into the link of U.S. foreign aid with Arroyo’s brutal counterinsurgency program that has caused such unconscionable massive atrocities.

Last March, UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston, who (at the end of his February visit) accused the government’s counterinsurgency scheme of encouraging or facilitating the killings, presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council a copy of the secret AFP “Order of Battle” document which converts soldiers as combatants in a “political war” against civilians. Arroyo and the military were not just in a “state of denial.” They were and are deeply involved in vilification of anyone critical of the Arroyo regime and complicit in the summary executions of those they label as “enemies of the state.” The party-list group BAYAN MUNA and allied organizations like BAYAN, for example, have been targeted as “communist fronts” by Arroyo’s Cabinet Oversight Committee on Internal Security. At present, 130 members of BAYAN MUNA (approximately 356 activists from various civic organizations) have succumbed to extra-judicial murder, abduction, arbitrary arrest, harassment and torture by State terrorist agents and paramilitary death-squads.

Mapping the “Killing Fields”

Dr. Carol P. Araullo, chairperson of BAYAN, has called the plan of extra-judicial killings, abductions, and torture a scarcely concealed “state policy” (see “Streetwise,” Business World 9-10, 16-17 March 2007). Last April, Human Rights Now, a Japanese human rights organization, concluded its fact-finding mission with the appeal to Arroyo “to immediately stop the policy of targeting civilization organizations and individual activists,” and to respect its obligation to follow the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights which the government has ratified. It will lobby the Japanese government to suspend all loan agreements “until it recognizes the human rights situation and accountability mechanism have clearly improved” (Press Statement, 21 April 2007).  This was reinforced by the prestigious InterParliamentary Union’s statement denouncing the arrest of Rep. Crispin Beltran and the harassment of the “Batasan 6” party-list representatives.

Earlier, on March 25, the Permanent People’s Tribunal handed down a verdict of “guilty” against Arroyo and Bush for “crimes against humanity.” Based on substantial evidence, testimonies, etc., the killings, torture and forced disappearances “fall under the responsibility of the Philippine government and are by no means justified in terms of necessary measures against terrorism.” Not only is the AFP involved in “the majority of the scenarios of human rights violations,” but it functions as “a central component and instrument of the policy of the ‘war on terror’ declared jointly by the Philippine and U.S. governments” that is being used to justify the political killings and impunity of both governments. Filipino Senator Jamby Madrigal, who testified at the People’s Tribunal against the Arroyo-Bush partnership’s ecological havoc, opined that Arroyo’s de facto “martial rule” has already turned the Philippines into a virtual “killing field.”

Encountering  Coni Ledesma

During that historic March session of the People’s Tribunal at The Hague, Netherlands, I was fortunate in meeting again Ms. Coni Ledesma, a member of the Negotiating Panel of the National Democratic Front-Philippines (NDFP) in peace talks with the government of the Republic of the Philippines. My first meeting with Coni took place over twenty years ago, in Rome, Italy, which I visited after I had chaired and participated in an international cultural symposium in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, in 1981. At The Hague, Coni was as vibrant as ever, knowledgeable and generous, open-minded particularly in relation with diasporic intellectuals from the “belly of the beast” like the present expatriate. I decided then that it would be a useful and rare opportunity to conduct this dialogue with an exemplary personality on themes and issues of general interest to a global audience.

To give a framework to this interview, I recapitulate the main events in Coni’s political history. Coni traces her politicization in the 1970s during the mass demonstrations in the Philippines against the Marcos regime which was then collaborating with the United States in the imperialist war in Indo-China. After some legal political seminars and activities, she went underground and became one of the founders of the Christians for National Liberation, a significant formation of church people that initiated a pathbreaking Filipino version of the “theology of liberation.” In August 1972, she was captured and detained for a year until she was released with the help of the Catholic bishops and the National Council of Churches (as Frank Cimatu reports in KASAMA, April-June 1998). She continued working with sugar workers in Negros, at which time (September 1973) she met her future husband Luis Jalandoni, who is now chair of the NDFP Negotiating Panel.

Aside from her role in the NDFP, Coni is also the international spokesperson of MAKIBAKA, an underground revolutionary organization of women, which has spearheaded the fight for women’s rights and collective well-being in the Philippines. MAKIBAKA, for the record, is not a feminist (in the Western academic construal of the term) but a nationalist women’s group concerned with women’s liberation in a neocolonial “third world” setting, allied with the NDFP. It has roots in the complex debates on “the woman question” in the sixties and seventies (see my book Filipina Insurgency, Giraffe Books, 1999) and in the militant participation of numerous women combatants in the revolution such as Maria Lorena Barros, Cherith Dayrit, Judy Taguiwalo, and Vicvic Justiniani, to cite only a few names.

In my view, Coni’s role in the national-democratic struggle has been immense and substantial, her experience a rich and dynamic reservoir of wisdom for use by solidarity groups everywhere. Thus I feel that her insight into what’s going on may afford us a perspective not available from other sources. My encounter with Coni at The Hague, at a time and place that fused the urgency of the crisis in the human-rights situation in the Philippines with the combative elan of the witnesses at the People’s Tribunal, the impasse of the anti-war efforts here in the metropolitan wasteland, and, above all, the realization that this wild and savage May election may be the pivotal turning-point in our national political life, has prompted this interview (conducted via the Internet from April 23 to May 8.)

E. San Juan (ESJ): The May election is crucial for Arroyo’s survival.  What is your reading of the situation today, before the elections on May 14?  What is your prediction should massive cheating be exposed and the public becomes infuriated?

Coni Ledesma (CL): Although the May election is not a presidential election, it is crucial for the survival of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.  She has survived two impeachment charges initiated in the House of Representatives, because she was able to buy the votes of the majority of the Congressmen, or because they were administration Congressmen and so voted against the impeachment.

If the opposition is to get at least one third of the seats of the lower house and a majority in the Senate, Congress could bring corruption and other charges against Arroyo and this could lead to her impeachment. She needs to ensure her hold on power and preserve the rotten and bankrupt system especially because she wants to conceal her crimes against the people.

She is already taking drastic steps to ensure the victory of administration candidates by using the Commission on Elections, the military and buying votes.  Although the law prohibits the AFP from electioneering, there are reports that General Esperon sent a radio message to all  personnel of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) to rig the results of the elections and ensure a 12-0 victory for the administration’s senatorial candidates.  AFP personnel are supporting and setting up campaign posters for the party list of General Jovito Palparan (also known as “the Butcher of Mindoro”).  AFP elements attacked the residence of religious leader, Eddie Villanueva, because of his anti-GMA stand (one of his sons is running for mayor in one of the cities of Mindoro, and another son heads the party-list Cibac).  Former President Corazon Aquino recently discovered that her telephone is being bugged.  And most recently, Makati Mayor Jojo Binay, who is also the president of the opposition party, United Opposition, was ordered suspended and was ordered to vacate City Hall. Supporters of Binay filled the City Hall, making it impossible for the police to send him out.  Binay is running for reelection and is expected to win against the Malacanang candidate, Lito Lapid.

It is expected that there will be “dagdag-bawas” (add-subtract) during the counting of the votes.  This means, adding votes for the administration candidates and taking away votes from the opposition.  This was the method used to make Arroyo “win” the presidency in 2004.

The increase in extra-judicial killing and enforced disappearance, especially of leaders and members of progressive political parties and organizations, is also a desperate and futile attempt of the Arroyo government to scare and disenfranchise these parties and organizations.

What would happen if the massive cheating is exposed and the public becomes infuriated?   The public is already infuriated.  Arroyo’s popularity rating is very low.  She is considered an illegitimate president because of massive cheating used to get her elected.  A possible reason why she still hasn’t been ousted is because of the question of who will take her place as president.  The logical constitutional succession would be the current Vice President, Noli de Castro.  But the large majority does not think he is qualified to be president.

Yet, an incident could ignite the people’s anger so much that it can lead to mass actions which can lead to Arroyo’s ouster.  This was the case with Ferdinand Marcos, and later, with Joseph Estrada.

ESJ: Should Arroyo’s group win and dominate the Batasan, do you agree with some observer’s opinion that Arroyo will implement the anti-terrorism law and suppress BAYAN and other opposition groups, including the party-list political formations – in other words, heighten de facto martial rule?

CL: Even without the anti-terrorism law, Arroyo is already trying to disqualify progressive party-lists like Bayan Muna, Anak Pawis and Gabriela Women’s Party.   But the passing and implementation of the anti-terrorism law is important not only as an instrument to help Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo stay in power, but also to preserve the interests of US imperialism.  The US “war on terrorism” is actually a war against national liberation movements, anti-imperialist forces and against those who pose a threat to US interests.

But the Filipino people are challenging the law and continuing to fight for their democratic rights. They are holding mass actions, protests, and moving to have the law declared unconstitutional.

ESJ: What is your forecast of the next year or two of Arroyo’s presidency, assuming she will win a majority in the Congress?  If she doesn’t, will impeachment unseat her?

CL: If Arroyo stays as president until 2010, and if her current dependence on the military continues, and if she will continue to enjoy the backing of the US, the gross violations of human rights will continue and even worsen.  She will implement the anti-terrorism law, or as it is euphemistically called “Human Security Act of 2007.” She will continue with the implementation of Operation Bantay Laya II (Operation Freedom Watch II).

Bantay Laya II is a continuation of the failed Bantay Laya I, a military campaign to crush the revolutionary movement, carried out in 2002-2006.   Bantay Laya II is aimed at wiping out the revolutionary movement in five years.  It is more vicious than Bantay Laya I, especially in its attacks against unarmed civilians and political activists living in the cities and towns. Death squads who kill or forcibly “disappear” anyone who opposes the regime is part of Bantay Laya II.

At the same time, Arroyo is faced with many problems which she has neither will nor capacity to solve.  She could be impeached if the opposition takes the majority in both houses of Congress. She is isolated and unpopular. The AFP is wracked by deep divisions within its ranks due to corruption and complicity in criminal activities. The economy is in chronic crisis.  It is being held afloat by massive borrowing and through the remittances of overseas Filipinos.  Meanwhile, the mass movement continues to grow.  A people’s movement could oust her.

ESJ: The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal Second Session on the Philippines pronounced a verdict of guilty on the US- Arroyo collusion.  Please assess for now the impact of this historic conference.

CL: The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal is a court of international opinion and independent from any State authority.  The importance and strength of its decisions rest on the moral weight of the causes and arguments to which they give credibility and their recognition in the UN Commission on Human Rights. The jurors are persons prominent in their respective fields of work.  The PPT itself has prestige within the United Nations and among NGOs.

The Second Session on the Philippines was held on March 21-25, 2007, in The Hague, the Netherlands.  It was held shortly after the Melo Commission and UN Special Rapporteur for Extra-judicial Executions, Philip Alston, came out with their respective reports finding the military responsible for the torture, extra judicial killings and disappearances of hundreds of leaders and members of progressive people’s organizations.

The Tribunal judged the governments of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and of George Walker Bush, accountable ” for crimes against humanity, with all the consequences for the persons who are responsible for them.”  It also stated that “such violations must be stopped immediately.”  The Tribunal connected the human rights violations with the interests of the United States. It gave a more comprehensive and deeper analysis of the Philippine situation.

The appeal, indictment and verdict can be used as guides in studying the situation in the Philippines.  They are also important documents for solidarity groups and organizations in planning activities and campaigns for the Philippines.  The Tribunal denounces as unacceptable the inclusion of the Philippine government in the UN Human Rights Council. A campaign should be launched to call for the removal of the Philippines from the Council.

ESJ: Please give a brief survey of the European attitude to Arroyo’s bloody human rights record.

CL: With the increase in gross violations of human rights, more and more European governments and inter-governmental bodies have spoken out to condemn and call a stop to these violations.  In a forum in Oslo, Norway, a representative of the Norwegian government expressed concern about the human rights violations in the Philippines. No official of a European country has voiced such a concern in the past.

During the ASEM meeting in Helsinki, on September 10-11, 2007, the President of Finland, Tarja Halonen, raised the issue of political killings during Arroyo’s official call on her.  The Finnish Foreign Minister later said, “We also want to see an end to the political killings which still form a harsh reality of that country”.  Shortly after that, when Arroyo visited Belgium, European Commission President, Jose Manuel Barroso reminded Arroyo that the political killings in the Philippines were a matter of concern to the European Commission.

The European Commission’s chief envoy to the Philippines, Ambassador Alistair MacDonald, expressed shock over the human rights abuses that have become a daily occurrence in the country.

The European Parliament, in a plenary meeting in Strasbourg, passed a resolution expressing “grave concern at the increasing number of political killings that have occurred in recent years in the Philippines”, and urged “the Philippine authorities to make the necessary investigations in a timely, thorough and transparent manner and to bring those responsible to justice.”   The Inter Parliamentary Union has expressed concern about the continuing repression of six members of the Philippine Congress, Congressmen Satur Ocampo, Crispin Beltran, Liza Maza, Joel Virador, Rafael Mariano, and Teddy Casino and called for the release from detention of Crispin Beltran.

After conducting its own fact-finding mission on the human rights situation in the Philippines, the World Council of Churches issued a statement on September 2006 condemning the extra-judicial executions and called an end to the killings. An international fact-finding mission of lawyers (from the groups, Lawyers for Lawyers, Lawyers Without Borders, and International Association of Democratic Lawyers) went to the Philippines last June 2006 to specifically investigate the killings of lawyers and judges.   After the disappearance of Jonas Burgos, in late April 2007, the Amnesty International campaign coordinator said the Philippines’ image has become that of ” a land of lawlessness.”

ESJ: What role have Filipino migrants in Europe and elsewhere performed and accomplished in the task of confronting the political killings and massive corruption of the Arroyo regime?  Are there new signs of political mobilization on their part?

CL: Filipino migrants in different parts of the globe have formed human rights organizations and have set up forums and other public events to inform the people of the host country about the situation. They are participating in the different actions because their families back home are affected by the policy of killings by the Arroyo government and the military. During forums held, they share the experience of their families and friends who have become victims of human rights violations.

And now, after the Tribunal, Filipino organizations are holding forums and symposia to talk about the verdict of the Tribunal and call for more actions against ongoing human rights violations in the Philippines.

ESJ: Finally, what is your assessment of the gains of the national democratic movement so far, and what are the problems it faces in the future?

CL: In the Philippines, we have the legal national democratic movement composed of legal and open people’s organizations.  And we have the 17 allied organizations of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines and the millions of the revolutionary masses they lead, undertaking national democratic revolution through people’s war.

Both the legal and the underground revolutionary movements accept the analysis that the root causes of the problems in Philippine society are US imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism.  They also accept that a change in the present system is necessary.  Both aspire for a society where the Philippines will be free from US domination, where the feudal mode of production and values are replaced with genuine land reform, and peasants will be given land of their own to till. Where the natural wealth of the Philippines will be owned and managed by Filipinos.  Where there will be national industrialization. And bureaucrat capitalism will be replaced with a government free of corruption, where the vast majority of Filipinos (workers, peasants, fisherfolk and petty bourgeoisie) will be adequately represented.  A system where there will be real democracy.

The Arroyo regime calls the legal people’s organizations “front” organizations of the CPP and the NDFP. They are not front organizations of the CPP and the NDFP. These legal organizations subscribe to and are guided by their own constitutions, organizational principles, and programs.

The national democratic organizations comprise the legal mass movement which has been the most consistent in the anti-imperialist and democratic legal struggle in the country.  It has a strong mass movement.  It has members in parliament.  It is creative in using all forms of struggle to push for reforms and fight against the ongoing exploitation and oppression in the country.  It organizes and mobilizes hundreds of thousands in different organizations and is deeply rooted among the Filipino people.

Of the substantial gains and achievements of the national democratic movement since the 1960s, I will only mention the following: One significant achievement of the national democratic movement has been its politicalization of the Filipino people as a whole.  There is now a greater awareness of US imperialism’s hold on Philippine political, economic and cultural life than there was twenty or thirty years ago.  For example, the broad mass movement was instrumental for the Senate voting the bases out of the Philippines in 1991.

The national democratic movement played a most crucial role in ousting two presidents, Marcos and Estrada, and by doing so has weakened the neocolonial system.

Major achievements have also been the two major Rectification Movements of the Communist Party of the Philippines.  The first rectification movement was in the 1960’s.  It repudiated the errors of the Partido Kommunista ng Pilipinas and led to the re-establishment of the Communist Party in 1968.  The Second Great Rectification Movement was in 1992. The Central Committee took a strong position to analyze the major errors in the ideological, political and organizational line of the Communist Party and correct them.  The rectification movement of the CPP influenced other national democratic organizations to look into their work and to undertake major corrections.  The growth and vigor of the national democratic movement today is the result of this rectification movement.

The NDFP, the CPP and the New People’s Army organize mainly in the countryside.  Organs of political power and revolutionary organizations of women, youth and peasants are continually being established and strengthened.  Mass campaigns such as health, education and economic programs that benefit hundreds of thousands of women, youth, peasants, settlers, and indigenous peoples are taking place in over 120 guerrilla fronts throughout the country.  Implementation of the minimum program of agrarian reform such as lowering of land rent, increase of farm wages and farm gate prices, lessening of usury and establishment of cooperatives, is benefiting the peasant masses. One of the gains of the national democratic movement has been the growth in political awareness and participation in the struggle of women.  Women in their numbers have joined national democratic organizations.  They have been elected to positions of responsibility and are among the most militant in defending their rights.

MAKIBAKA (Makabayang Kilusan ng Kababaihan/Patriotic Movement of Women), a revolutionary women’s organization and a member of the NDFP, draws its membership from peasant, worker and women of petty bourgeoisie in the cities.  Many MAKIBAKA members have joined the NPA and have shown excellence in the field.  Many have given up their lives in the struggle.

What problems will the national democratic movement face in the future?  Because of the crisis of the present system, the national democratic movement can expect more repression from the reactionary state.  And so, the national democratic forces have to be prepared for this.

E. San Juan, Jr. works with the Philippine Forum, New York City, and the Philippines Cultural Studies Center in Connecticut. He was recently Fulbright professor of American Studies at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium; visiting professor of cultural studies at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan; and fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center, Bellagio, Italy. His recent books are Filipinos Everywhere (IBON), In the Wake of Terror (Lexington Books), and U.S. Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines(Palgrave Macmillan).

James Petras 

Introduction

Never in recent history has US Middle East policy been subject to such a barrage of conflicting pressures from erstwhile allies, clients as well as adversaries. The points of contention involve fundamental issues of war and peace, foremost of which are divergent responses to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the US-Iranian confrontation, the US occupation of Iraq as well as the US-Ethiopian proxy invasion and occupation of Somalia.

The major contenders for influence in the making of US policy in the Middle East include the ‘war party’ led by the Zionist power configuration and its followers in Congress and its allies among the civilian militarists in the White House led by Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Rice, National Security Adviser for Middle East Affairs Elliot Abrams, along with an army of scribes in the major print media. On the other side are a small minority of Congress-people, ex-officials linked to Big Oil, a divided Peace Movement, Arab Gulf States, Saudi Arabia and a number of European countries on specific sets of issues.

To date the Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) has consistently lined up its Congressional and White House backers and steamrollered domestic opposition in securing unconditional US backing for Israel’s position in the Middle East. One of the latest examples of the Zionist Power Configuration’s political and media influence is illustrated by their dismissal or omission of a major document on human and civil rights in Israel issued by the United Nation’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (published March 9, 2007). The study compiled by two-dozen experts offered 19 recommendations for Israel to comply with in 25 areas of racial discrimination against Arab citizens of Israel. Israel rejected the report, the ZPC automatically followed suit, as did Washington.

Nevertheless there are signs (weak to be sure) that the visible and invisible power of the ZPC is being subject to critical public scrutiny and even ‘put on trial’ among US clients. The Council of Gulf Cooperation composed of Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Bahrein and the United Arab Emirates are the world’s biggest oil suppliers (over 40%), made up of conservative, pro-US regimes, housing US military bases, linked to the largest US oil and financial houses and the biggest purchasers of military hardware from the US military-industrial complex. They met in late March 2007, and called for the US to engage Iran diplomatically and not militarily or with economic sanctions. Israel took a diametrically opposing view pushing for tighter sanctions and a military confrontation.  Automatically the ZPC echoed the Israeli Party line (Daily Alert, March 26-30, 2007). Congress and Bush ignored Big Oil, the military-industrial complex, its Arab clients and followed the Zionist line: they escalated sanctions, increased commando operations, added to the war-ships off the coast of Iran and offered to send fighter-planes into Iran after British sailors, engaged in espionage, were captured (Blair, for once, rejected the war provocation). Once again the ZPC out-muscled Big Oil and the military-industrial complex in dictating US Middle-East policy.

Equally important, the US foremost Arab ‘allies’ in the Middle East have promulgated a series of proposals and policy options, which are directly opposed to the ZPC-Israeli agenda. Saudi Arabia’s proposal approved by the Arab League offering Israel recognition and normal relations in exchange for abiding by UN resolutions and returning territory seized in 1967 is one example. These Arab initiatives have elicited a positive response in many governments in the European Union and Turkey, adding to the forces arraigned against the ZPC-Israeli direction for US Middle East policy. Defectors from the Israeli lobby’s cause have been especially noticeable from among conservatives, including Robert Novack (“US War in Iraq – The Sharon War”, Haaretz, April 4, 2007).

New Directions for US Policy: Moderate Arab Agenda?

The primary pre-occupation of the moderate Arab regimes of the Persian Gulf is securing political stability, avoiding disruptive regional and internal conflicts and consolidating a favorable business climate for the dynamic development projects they have undertaken. The US military invasion, occupation and prolonged violent imperial war in Iraq have been a source of instability and internal conflict in the region. Israel’s repeated military assaults and violent seizures of Palestinian land, its invasion of Lebanon and threats against Iran and, most important, their political vehicle – the ZPC’s capacity to ensure US backing – has created an environment of permanent ‘high tension’. The growing incompatibility between the conservative-business oriented goals of the moderate Arab states and the ‘radical militarist’ destabilizing policies of Washington and Tel Aviv has forced a widening breach between the long-time allies and clients. With large trade surpluses, enormous liquidity in dollars and Euros, the Arab East is intent on building economic empires both in the region and throughout the globe. For that they need, above all, a secure ‘home base’, the headquarters and operating base to sustain the global financial, commercial and real estate networks.

The recent meeting of Arab state in Riyadh, convoked by the Saudis, served as a platform for outlining a program for Middle East stability and the ending of violent destabilizing activities. Both in their formal proposals and informal pronouncements the conservative leaders put forth an agenda to re-direct US Middle East policy away from the ZPC-Israel line of military confrontation and toward diplomatic negotiations, elite reconciliation and the strengthening of regional economic stability. Within this conservative regional framework and the high priority given to economic stability, the ‘new facts’ on the ground (namely the critical position toward the US and the peace offer to Israel) become key markers in defining Middle East politics.

‘New Facts’ and the New Middle East Realities

The old clichés lobbed by liberal critics of the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia are highly misleading and fail to capture the new economic and political dynamics of the region. The liberal and Zionist images of reactionary sheiks engaged in conspicuous consumption, luxuriating in their backward and stagnant economies, living exclusively on ‘rents’ accruing from the gushing oil wells and dependent on US military protection, has largely been superseded. All the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia are heavily engaged in long-term, large-scale economic diversification projects, creating new business, financial, commercial and real estate markets, based on local capital and, in some cases, major overseas investment banks. Major joint industrial ventures in energy, refineries, and chemical plants between Saudi Arabia and China and India have been consummated. Multi-billionaire ‘princes’ are major investors and part owners of global networks of financial enterprises, hotels, ports and other large-scale infrastructure and construction sectors.

Energy wealth from gas and petroleum is the point of departure for the new ruling elites, reinventing themselves as regional if not global players. While still retaining many of the ‘external traditional religious forms’ (opposition to usury), vast armies of local financiers have in fact invented financial instruments that pay de facto returns equivalent to interest. Given the growing global and regional economic interests of these conservative elites they have everything to lose by following US-Israeli destructive-colonial-militarist policies in the region.

Economic diversification and dynamic internal development has created a new bourgeoisie in the Gulf linked to European and Asian capital (state and private), increasingly politically independent from the US and less dependent on ‘external’ military power. These new economic facts provide clues to the new ‘political facts’ on the ground, including Saudi Arabia’s low key, but forthright, critique of the US occupation of Iraq and demands for troop withdrawal. The Gulf States backing for the Saudi initiated “Mecca Agreements” leading to the PLO-Hamas unity government, explicitly went against the White House-Israeli-Zionist policy of isolating Hamas as did the explicit rejection by Saudi Arabia and the Emirates of US and Israeli war preparations against Iran. They have rejected Washington’s and Israeli-Zionist’s policy of refusing to meet with Iran, by holding separate top level meetings and discussions. The Arab League’s offer – authored and authorized by Saudi Arabia – to Israel of peace and recognition in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from the 1967 regions of occupied Palestine has exposed Israel’s pretexts for continued colonization and annexation of Palestinian land and US subordination to the Zionist Power Configuration.

The new economic and political facts in the Middle East pit an increasingly militarized US foreign policy elite, heavily influenced by the Zionist Power Configuration, against an increasingly marketized Arab Gulf elite.  Israel’s military-industries, central to its economy, the political leverage of the settler parties, religious fundamentalists and security apparatus, and the Israeli state’s dependence on multi-billion dollar handouts from the US treasury and wealthy right-wing militarist Jewish donors means that Israel is structurally incapable of coming to any peace for land agreement. The re-settlement of a half-million armed fanatical Jewish settlers into pre-1967 Israel, the peaceful re-conversion of Israel’s military industries and maintaining support from overseas Zionist plutocrats without the rhetoric of ‘existential military threats’ is beyond the boundaries of the Israeli political class as it is currently constituted. The deep integration and subordination of the Zionist Power Configuration to the Israeli power structure result in the demands of Israel’s settler-military-industrial complex getting transmitted into the US Congress and Executive and eventually into policy.

In so far as this is the case, the ZPC is responsible for the rigidities of US Middle East policy expressed in its fixation on permanent warfare, and its blindness to the yawning gap between market-driven Arab states and US-Israeli militarism. ZPC accounts for the unchanging, unconditional support for an anachronistic colonial regime in a time of growing global market relations. The paralysis of US policy is the result of the power of a modern 21st century extraordinarily wealthy and entrepreneurial lobby (24% of Forbes 400 richest are Jews) acting on behalf of fundamentalist Judaic territorial claims going back to a period almost 2500 years ago. The notion of ‘combined and uneven development’ certainly applies to Israel’s biggest overseas financiers.

The rigid structural parameters of Israeli politics are transmitted via the ZPC into the basic contradictory reality in US-Israeli relations: The rigid structural politics of a tiny ‘isolated, militarized, settler-controlled’ state blocking economic transactions of a globalized imperial economy by forcing it into disastrous military adventures.

Zionist Power and the Democratic Congressional Majority

Contrary to many war critics, especially those daring enough to attack the pro-war, neo-conservative and Zionist lobby, the US invasion of Iraq has not been a ‘disaster’, a ‘debacle’ or a ‘defeat’. The corollary of this argument that the ‘Iraq disaster’ has led to a ‘rout’ of the Zioncons from the Bush Administration is also open to question.

The principle goal of the ZPC was the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the destruction of the Iraqi state (especially its military and intelligence apparatus) and the societal infrastructure in order to eliminate a key backer of the Palestinian resistance to Israeli ethnic cleansing, a staunch backer of secular Arab nationalism in the Middle East and a strong challenger to Israel’s attempt to assert hegemony in the region. The Zioncon-orchestrated war succeeded in each and every one of Israel’s strategic objectives: the Palestinian resistance lost a powerful financial and political backer. The Middle East opposition to Israel was reduced largely to clerical Muslim states and movements. The stage was set for a new sequence of wars with Israeli adversaries, including Hezbollah, Syria and, most important, Iran. As a consequence of the US destruction of the Iraqi state, Israel had a free hand in invading and devastating Palestine, especially Gaza, complete its ghetto-wall isolating Palestinian towns and villages from their markets and everyday activities, and extending its colonial settlements. US Zioncons in the Administration were able to scuttle any serious peace negotiations, using their scripted ‘war against terror’ as a pretext. The departure of some of the Zioncons from the Administration in the aftermath of the US military occupation of Iraq was a result of having successfully served Israeli strategic interests through a massive commitment of US economic and military resources. But as the Israel-serving war turned into an unpopular, prolonged and costly war for the United States, public and highly placed critics, investigators and military figures began to point their finger at the key role of the Zionist officials in the Government as the prime movers of the ‘disastrous’ war, the Zioncons ‘resigned’ from office. This short-circuited any wide-reaching and serious investigation into the interface between the US Zioncon war architects and the Israeli Foreign Office and its military command.

Out of their successful ‘war with Iraq’ operation the Zioncons suffered a few collateral losses. Irving ‘Scooter’ Libby, Chief of Vice President Cheney’s military planning office, was convicted on peripheral perjury charges, which did not directly implicate the Zioncon network’s role in the run-up and follow-through on the war. One major and one secondary AIPAC leaders were indicted for spying for Israel. The two indicted spies did not in any way materially or politically weaken AIPAC’s powerful hold over the US Congress or White House. They continued to receive unconditional support from the US Congressional leaders of both parties, as well as the Vice President and Secretary of State who gave keynote addresses at the AIPAC’s annual conventions in 2006 and 2007.

The fact that the ZPC considers the Iraq war a ‘done deal’ in enhancing Israel’s Middle East position and has now moved onto realizing Israel’s next strategic objective, the destruction of Iran, has caused a visible rift with key officials in the White House who are still stuck in a losing war in Iraq.

Vice President Cheney, speaking at the AIPAC annual convention in 2007, directly challenged AIPAC leaders who seemed to be abandoning support for the Administration’s Iraq war and pressing for more aggressive economic sanctions and the war option strategy toward Iran. The Zioncons seek to maximize support for their new phony ‘existential’ war against Iran among Jewish liberals who have turned against the Iraq war, thus leaving Cheney and Bush holding the US body bags.  At the AIPAC convention, Cheney, no neophyte to backstabbing intrigues, offered to escalate US threats against Iran if the Zionists maintained their support for the Bush-Cheney-Rice war in Iraq. While Israeli Prime Minister Olmert formally reiterated the importance of the US continuing its occupation of Iraq for Israeli ‘security’, in practice all his ministers attending every major Zionist conference have emphasized to their US acolytes the Iranian threat and the need to eliminate the Iranian regime, its nuclear power plants and state structures. Despite the fact that the US is bleeding white from the open wounds of the current war in Iraq, despite the fact that over three quarters of the US population is fed up with US involvement in Middle Eastern wars, this has not prevented or, even more important, weakened the ZPC effort to set the US on a course toward new wars with the whole hearted support of the majoritarian Democratic Party leadership.

With an eye toward campaign financial contributions, every single Democratic and Republican presidential candidate has pledged to unconditionally support Israeli interests, specific pledges to the ZPC-AIPAC included.

The Pro-Israel Lobby and  Bush: War Powers and the Capitulation of the Democrats

The key factor in the Democrats’ withdrawal of constraints of Bush’s management of the occupation of Iraq was the Jewish Lobby.  According to the Associated Press (March 13, 2007): “Conservative Democrats, as well as lawmakers concerned about the possible impact on Israel, had argued for the change in strategy…” As the Congressional Quarterly noted: “Hawkish pro-Israel lawmakers are pushing to strike a provision slated for the war spending bill that would require the President to seek Congressional approval before launching any military force in Iran.”

The Iran-related proposal stemmed from a desire by some leading Democratic politicians to ensure that Bush did not launch an attack without going to Congress for approval, a measure approved by the vast majority of Democratic rank and file. But during the week of March 5-10, the Zionist elite both in Congress and in the Lobby banged heads in a series of closed door sessions and literally forced the ‘leading Democrats’ to recant and capitulate. Echoing the Olmert line, one of several Zionist mouthpieces in Congress overtly spoke against constitutional and legislative restraints on President Bush because of its ‘effect’ on Israel. Representative Shelley Berkley said in an interview, “there is widespread fear in Israel about Iran which…has expressed unremitting hostility about the Jewish State.” Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emmanuel, who works closely with AIPAC, ‘predicted’, “It would take away perhaps the most important negotiating tool that the US has when it comes to Iran,”(Associated Press March 13, 2007). He succeeded in excluding the amendment in the Supplemental War Budget Allocation, although it was initially favored by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Representative John Murtha, Chair of the Defense Appropriation Committee.

A smirking Vice President Cheney pointed out the hypocrisy of the pro-Israel liberal Democratic Congresspeople and liberal Zionists who opposed Bush on Iraq and were pressing a pro-war policy on Iran. “It is simply not consistent for anyone (including pro-Israel liberals! JP) to demand aggressive action against the menace posed by the Iranian regime while at the same time acquiescing in a retreat from Iraq that would leave our worst enemies dramatically emboldened and Israel’s best friend, the United States, dangerously weakened,” (AP March 13, 2007). Once again the interests of Israel took precedence over the voting preferences of the Democratic electorate. Once more the power of Congressman Rahm Emmanuel and his fellow ‘conservative’ pro-Zionist congressional colleagues overpowered the  ‘conscience’ of other leading Democrats.  Once again AIPAC freed Bush from any Constitutional and Congressional constraints to launch a military attack on Iran. Once again Israel’s bellicose policy dictates were effectively transmitted and implemented in the US Congress. The Democrats abandoned the war authority provision of the Constitution. Israel once again demonstrated that it is the supreme arbiter of US Middle East war policy through its representatives in the US Congress. (No wonder Buchanan and others call the Congress ‘Israeli-occupied territory’).

Bush got AIPAC backing for his arbitrary war powers; Israel retained a President who is a willing accomplice to its war aims in the Middle East.

Israel-AIPAC-US Middle East Wars

The role of Israel in mobilizing the Zionist Lobby in favor of Bush’s broad war powers was evident in Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni’s forceful speech to the annual AIPAC conference in Washington in March 2007. According to the Israeli daily, Haaretz (March 12, 2007) Livni “warned the US not to show weakness in Iraq.” She went on to emphasize the importance of exercising violence and power… “in a region where impressions are important, countries must be careful not to demonstrate weakness and surrender to extremists.” This is another way of stating the familiar Israeli canard that ‘Arabs only understand force’, a well-worn colonial-racist justification for widespread and continued repression of subjugated Arab people.

Livni instructed the thousands of cheering AIPAC loyalists and hundreds of US Congressional followers at the convention of the Iranian threat and incited them to escalate their attacks on Teheran: “Iran was at the forefront of extremist threats to Israel, the Greater Middle East and the world in general because of its nuclear ambitions. To address extremism is to address Iran, she said urging tougher UN sanctions over its nuclear program,” (Haaretz March 12, 2007). Livni’s closing words touched all the agit-prop code words that fire-up the zealotry of the AIPAC leaders, followers and US Congresspeople. Iran, she stated, “is a regime which denies the Holocaust while threatening the world with a new one. To those states who know the threat but still hesitate because of narrow economic and political interests, let me say this: History will remember!”

Livni’s speech served several purposes. It laid down the ‘line’ to pro-Israel loyalists in the US to continue supporting Bush-Cheney’s policy on the Iraq war, independently of the sentiments of most American Jewish voters. It strengthened the hand of the Lobby and its US Congressional followers by forcing House liberals, Jews and Gentiles, to retract their American voter-mandated constraints on Bush’s war powers. Thirdly it laid out the high priority agenda and campaign for its Zionist followers to pursue with regard to Iran. Finally it ended any breach between Cheney-Bush and the Lobby over prioritizing a ‘new’ war against Iran over the ‘old’ unpopular war in Iraq by tying them together.

The Israeli Foreign Minister’s direct intervention in the internal politics of the US, its blatant support for the Bush-Cheney war, and attack on the US public’s anti-war sentiments, is reminiscent of the worst diplomatic intrusions by the US in the banana republics of Central America. Not a single Congress member dared to point this out, let alone oppose Israeli interference in US politics for fear of retaliation by the aroused mass of ‘Israel Firsters’. Not a single ‘leftist’ or ‘progressive’ commentator noted that Livni’s attempt to universalize Israel’s hostility to Iran was nothing but a demagogic ploy.  Extensive opinion surveys in Europe found absolute majorities rating Israel the most threatening and ‘negative’ country in the world, exceeding Iran, North Korea and Syria. The fact that Iran is a welcome participant in the World Congress of Islamic Countries representing over 500 million people is a slight omission in Livni’s rhetorical excesses. These lapses are no cause for worry in the Israeli Foreign Office, because it is not the propagation of deliberate and verifiable falsehoods which is a problem, but the power of lies to arouse to action its US agents and to discourage any possible US critics. By sounding off on the ‘Holocaust’ and its corollary, ‘History will remember’, Israel was guaranteed the blind fanatical adherence of the ZPC to its bellicose war policies and the silence and capitulation of its ineffective Jewish liberal anti-war doubters. The Jewish-based ‘AIPAC Alternative’, especially the ‘Jewish Voice for Peace’, spends as much time denying the power of the pro-Israel Lobby as criticizing US policy (Nation April 23, 2007 on AIPAC Alternative).

In an ironic and perverse twist of the pro-Israel, anti-war slogan, ‘No War for Oil’, Livni demanded ‘No Peace for Oil’. Livni’s warning to those “states who know the threat but still hesitate because of narrow economic or political interests”, is a clear reference to the United States. More specifically it is aimed at politicians who might look toward peaceful negotiations with Iran, or accept the Saudi peace plan in order to safeguard US oil interests, rather than sacrificing these interests to serve Israel’s political and military supremacy in the Middle East. Livni is clearly directing its ‘Israel Firsters’ in the US to trump the Oil Appeasers, to browbeat any politicians who raise US market concerns over Israeli and Zionist war demands.

While Livni’s perception of the danger to Israel emanates from the peaceful-diplomatic approach of ‘narrow (sic) economic or political interests’ (to the even narrower Israeli concern for land grabs in Palestine and Lebanon), what passes as a US peace movement joins in chorus by blaming the oil industry for US Middle Eastern wars. There is a convenient coincidence of Israeli hawks and US doves in denouncing Big Oil, which is not such a coincidence if we remember that what passes for the US peace movement is inordinately influenced by prominent left Zionists, who combine criticism of ‘Bush’s war’ with exclusion of any mention of Israel or criticism of the war mongering Zionist lobby. Before, during and after the AIPAC conference in Washington several thousand of its zealots blitzed the offices of Congress members and Senators. More than half the Congress members and practically every Senator were browbeaten in over 500 meetings in favor of Israel’s war agenda against Iran.

In late March the Arab League led by Saudi Arabia proposed a comprehensive peace plan to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The proposal offered Arab recognition, trade and diplomatic relations, an end of the state of belligerency and economic sanctions, in exchange for Israel abiding by United Nations resolutions and withdrawing from all Palestinian lands seized during and after the 1967 war. The Israeli Prime Minister flatly refused to accept the Saudi proposal arguing that it was only the ‘basis of negotiations’. The ZPC immediately echoed the Israeli party line, calling into question the form and substance of the proposal as well as attacking the Arab regimes. On March 29, 2007 alone, the organ of the Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations published four major propaganda pieces attacking the peace proposal and backed Israel’s rejection. The Lobby ensured that the US Congress and executive either supported the Israeli position or refused to back the Saudi plan. Once again, AIPAC’s 150 full time lobbyists ran circles around pro-Arab US oil multinationals.

House Majority Leader as Israel’s Messenger

Democratic House Majority leader Nance Pelosi’s visit to Syria stirred a hostile response from the White House and accolades from liberals and progressives. Bush objected to Pelosi for interfering with his foreign policy powers and ‘non-negotiation’ position vis a vis Syria. Liberals hailed Pelosi’s visit as opening new vistas for ‘diplomacy’ rather than saber rattling. Both failed to recognize that Pelosi’s main substantive task was to serve as a proxy and messenger for the Israeli state. During her visit to Israel, prior to going to Syria, the Israeli regime instructed Pelosi to pressure Syria to end support for Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. The Israeli prime minister told his messenger, Pelosi, to relay to the Syrians that breaking ties and isolating itself from its only allies were the conditions for Israel opening negotiations. This was despite the fact that up to Pelosi’s visit to Syria, AIPAC and the entire Zionist political machine had vilified any Congress member who even mentioned visiting Syria. However when Israel gave the word that Pelosi was running Israeli messages to Syria, the Lobby did not object. The party line from Tel Aviv had shifted and the Israeli Fifth column automatically shifted its line, and not one of its ‘functionaries’ raised a peep. There were far more overseas Communist dissenters when Stalin abruptly changed the party line than there are Zionist defectors under similar circumstances.

The almost comical back flips and ideological contortions which the ‘Israel Firsters’ (IF) engage in to conform to the zigzags of their Israeli handlers are evident in their treatment of the Arab Gulf states. For the longest time the IF did everything possible to discredit them, referring to them as decrepit, absolutist states, and debunked the State Department’s characterization of them as ‘Arab Moderates’. More recently when Olmert referred to the same states as ‘moderate’ largely because they engage in covert trade with Israel through third parties, and criticized Iran, the Lobby revised its line and spoke favorable of them. Then when the Saudis brokered the Hamas-PLO unity government, Israel attacked the role of Saudi Arabia as backing the terrorist Hamas and the Zionist propaganda machine followed suit labeling the Saudis as financiers of Hamas terrorism. The blind servility of the Israel Lobby to a ‘foreign power’ would simply be a matter for the Justice Department if it didn’t have such a profound impact on US Middle East policy, where every Israeli change in policy is automatically reflected in US policy.

The Israel First Lobby Blocks Big US Arms Sale

With the US trade deficit exceeding $500 billion dollars, one of its few competitive export sectors is its arms industry, which is number one in world arms sales, followed by Israel. The Bush Administration’s planned arms sale to Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf allies has been blocked by Israeli action through its Zionist Lobby (NY Times, April 5, 2007). The Administration officials twice scheduled and canceled briefings for members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee because of AIPAC’s influence over the Committee and the likelihood that the arms deal would be rejected. As a result the Administration is hoping that Israel will call off its Lobby attack dogs in exchange for a 20% increase in US military aid and grants to Israel – upping the total of military aid from $2.4 billion dollars to $3 billion annually. Secretary of Defense Gates, who was unable to shake the Lobby’s influence over Congress, had to fly to Israel to plead with Israel to allow the sales to go through in exchange for receiving advanced US military technology.

US grants to Israel of advanced military research, design and technology has increased Israel’s competitive position in the world’s military high-tech market and increased its share at the expense of the US, as seen in its recent $1.5 billion dollar military sales to India. In brief, the Israel Lobby runs circles around the US military-industrial complex in terms of influencing the US Congress, blocking lucrative deals and advancing Israel’s sales in the world market.

Democratic Party Candidates Truckle to the Lobby

Major Democratic Party Presidential hopefuls have made an extraordinary effort to secure the Lobby’s approval: All back Bush’s ‘military option’ toward Iran; all support the annual $2.4 billion dollar foreign aid package to Israel, despite Israel’s $25,000 per capita income and booming high tech industry. Speaking before the National Jewish Democratic Council, New York Senator Hillary Clinton called on the US to confront Iran militarily (Jerusalem Post, April 26, 2007). Taking advantage of the fawning behavior of all the candidates, the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, promoted a panel of Israeli ‘experts’ to evaluate US Presidential candidates on the basis of their servility to Israeli interests. This, in turn, led Senator Obama to send his latest, most crass and bellicose pronouncements regarding Iran to the Israeli panel (see Robert Kagan, ‘Obama the Interventionist’, Washington Post April 29, 2007). Nonetheless, it is Hillary Clinton who leads the pack in securing Jewish campaign financing. The Lobby’s high regard for Clinton is not merely because of her total and complete identification with Israel – as stated as the March 2007 AIPAC Convention – but by the family’s notorious track record. Former CIA Director, George Tenet, in his latest book At the Center of the Storm, devotes an entire chapter to then President Bill Clinton’s proposal to free American-Israeli master-spy, Jonathan Pollard from federal prison. Under prodding from Israel’s far right-wing President Benyamin Netanyahu, his National Security Advisor, the Zionlib Sandy Berger, Zioncon envoy to the Middle East Dennis Ross and a substantial sector of the Lobby, Clinton proposed to release the convicted spy Pollard. According to his book, Tenet told Clinton that he would resign because he would lose all his moral capital with the entire intelligence apparatus that would argue that an American traitor was being rewarded. More likely, the entire military and intelligence community was outraged that Clinton would follow the policies laid out by the Israeli spymasters and their US lobbyists over American national security concerns.

Clinton later broke precedent in granting a pardon to a fugitive criminal, the billionaire swindler Marc Rich, now a citizen of Israel and close friend of the Lobby and Israeli leaders. Hillary Clinton has demonstrated that she and Bill not only speak, but also act, for the primacy of Israeli interests even when it involves going against the entire US security community and its legal system. That sordid history must count a lot in securing guarantees that the Clintons are bona fide 100% Israel camp followers, something none of the other candidates can boast.

In early May, the Bush Administration proposed an 8-month timetable of steps meant to bolster prospects for peace between Israel and Palestine. The proposal simply asked Israel to allow Palestinians normal but urgent bus and truck travel between Gaza and the West Bank in exchange for Palestinians curbing the homemade cross border rocket firings. As was predictable, the Israelis objected to even the slightest breach in the oppressive ghettoization of the Palestinians (Daily Alert May 2, 2007). Israeli leaders rejected a time-table because it prevented them from procrastinating: Israeli military officers opposed any loosening of their stranglehold on Gaza for “security reasons” (Daily Alert May 8, 2007). They maintained that Hamas might increase its influence in the West Bank through persuasion. Once the Israeli military rejected the Bush initiative, the Zionist Power Configuration went to work. The Democrats, including all their leading Presidential candidates and Congressional leaders, refused to back Bush’s anemic effort to open the Gaza ghetto. The mass media followed suit. The pro-Israel lobby buried the entire proposal before it even entered into public debate.

The Lobby Versus Federal Prosecutors: The AIPAC Spy Trial

On August 4, 2005 two AIPAC leaders and a Pentagon analyst, Larry Franklin were indicted by a federal grand jury and charged with spying for Israel. The indictment lists numerous acts of espionage dating back to 1999 in which the two AIPAC leaders acted as conduits for classified information flowing from Washington to Tel Aviv. Franklin has confessed and cooperated with the FBI in recording his meeting with Rosen and Weissman regarding the passing of high security White House document related to US policy on Iran to Israeli Embassy agents. Faced with overwhelming evidence AIPAC ‘fired’ Rosen and Weiss, stopped paying for their legal expenses and initially denied any responsibility for the pair. Subsequently however AIPAC and numerous satellite and auxiliary organizations decided to turn the spy trial into a campaign over ‘free speech’. Accordingly the liberal and conservative members of the pro-Israel lobby succeeded in rounding up a ‘Who’s Who’ of otherwise leftist journalists, progressive news broadcasters and academics in defense of Rosen and Weissman. Speaking in defense of the two AIPAC functionaries, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Dorothy Rabinowitz argued in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal that handing high security government documents to Israeli Embassy security agents are “activities that go on every day in Washington and that are clearly protected under the First Amendment” (Wall Street Journal, April 2, 2007). As the trial date approaches, major pro-Israel organizations, billionaire Hollywood producers and most, if not all, of the Jewish press in the US have taken the defense of Rosen and Weissman (The American “Dreyfuss Trial’). Except for a few internet bloggers, not a single political party, social or political movement has dared to criticize acts of handing over classified documents to Israel or to raise eyebrows over the equation of ‘free speech’ with spying for a foreign power. Because of the pervasive pressure of the Lobby, the Federal Judge T.S. Ellis has made several procedural rulings weakening the case of the prosecution. Once again the Zionist Power Configuration seems to have successfully out-muscled US institutions, in this case Federal prosecutors and the FBI.

AIPAC and Israel: Strategic Informant in the White House

The spy trial of two top officials of AIPAC, who admitted to handing over strategic documents to Israeli diplomats, (and who have been defended on the basis of ‘free speech’ by a host of American progressive left Zionists) has turned up further evidence of their deep penetration of the highest echelons of the White House. In the preliminary hearings of the spy trial, defense attorney Abby Lowell, in an attempt to exonerate the Zionist spy suspects, announced that the accused received ‘explosive’ and even more volatile information from then National Security Adviser Condeleeza Rice (Jewish Telegraph Agency, April 10, 2007). There is little doubt that the Rice’s transmission of confidential security information to AIPAC was also handed over to the Israeli embassy and its undercover Mossad agents operating in Washington.

The Lobby spy network extends beyond confessed Pentagon spy, Laurence Franklin, who handed confidential documents to the accused AIPAC officials. According to the Jewish Telegraph Agency quoting Attorney Abby Lowell, “Rice had not merely been Rosen’s interlocutor but had leaked information identical to and at times more sensitive than examples cited in the indictment.” In addition Lowell said the information Rice provided was more volatile than the information described in the indictment. Lowell claimed that ‘three other current and former Middle East policy officials, in addition to Rice” were providing information to the AIPAC accused Israeli spies.

The Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC): Cultural Repression at the Service of Israel

Racist rabble-rousing against Muslims runs rife among zealous Zionists inside the US Government and outside among mainstream pro-Israel organizations with no apparent reprimands. The Conference of Presidents of the Major Jewish Organizations (CPMJO) backed co-thinker and Israeli-US dual citizen Michael Chertoff’s (head of the Department of Homeland Security) efforts to curtail Muslim visits to the US, including British citizens, of what the New York Times (May 2, 2007) diplomatically refers to as of “Pakistani origin”. In a follow up lead article in the CPMJO news bulletin The Daily Alert (May 9, 2007) they featured a xenophobic article by Josh Meyer and Erika Hayasaki titled, “Six Foreign-born ‘Radical Islamists’ Charged in Plot to Strike Fort Dix Army Base.” When pro-Israel zealots in high government positions engage in blatant racist witch-hunts against Muslims and respectable mainstream Zionist umbrella organizations publish inflammatory, xenophobic rhetoric, no Congress members or Justice Department officials call for public hearings or inquiries.

The power of ZPC far exceeds the political lobbying of AIPAC. It extends to every realm of US cultural and intellectual life. The frenzied vitriolic nation-wide mass media personal assaults on former President Jimmy Carter for authoring a critical book documenting Israel’s apartheid system is one example of the extensive web of Zionist propagandists. Many are situated in major academic and media institutions and share a common set of hardened doctrinaire beliefs in Israel’s infallibility. The same malicious treatment was dished out to Harvard Professor Mersheimer and University of Chicago Professor Walt for writing a critical article on the US Zionist lobby. Apart from the wave of ideological screeds condemning the essay and slandering the authors with the usual banalities (‘anti-Semites’), several wealthy Jewish ‘philanthropists’ forced the Harvard corporation to dissociate itself from the essay on its Kennedy School website. The same Zionist octopodian reach was manifested in the canceling of a meeting discussing Israel, which included New York University Professor Tony Judt, a rather mild critic of the Jewish state and its Lobby. Most pernicious, and in some ways even more demonstrative of the brazen repressive cultural role of the Zionist Power Configuration is their power to prevent a play which is based on the writings of the murdered American human rights worker Rachel Corrie, who was crushed by an Israeli army bulldozer in the Gaza Strip in April 2003. In New York, Miami and Toronto, publicly scheduled performances of My Name is Rachel Corrie were forced to cancel because of financial threats by local Jewish ‘philanthropists’ and ‘patrons of the arts’. The seriousness of these blatant acts of political and cultural censorship reveals the ZPC’s profound and open hostility to the best examples of US humanitarian solidarity and embrace the worst kinds of Israeli violence. Not a single leftist or progressive critic dared to raise the issue of American Zionist complicity in this egregious ‘hate crime’ committed by a foreign power against an American human rights worker. No other group can successfully back the cold-blooded killers of an American citizen with impunity, anonymity and continue to retain credentials as ‘patrons of the arts and culture’. To this day, 40 years after the fact, the same pro-Israel crowd defends or excuses Israel’s deliberate military attack on the unarmed US naval surveillance ship the USS Liberty in international waters, killing and wounding about 150 US sailors. This gang of ‘Israel Firsters’ is honored in their communities here in the United States, welcome to high office and secure in their affluent surroundings.

Highly qualified candidates with outstanding résumés are denied academic and professional appointments or threatened with loss of tenure or expulsion for the mere reason of criticizing Israel. The cases of Professor Juan Cole’s appointment at Yale and Professor Norman Finkelstein at De Paul University are the most notorious cases. The world-renowned Palestinian American scholar, Edward Said was persecuted and slandered up to his recent death by the attack hounds of the Lobby.

The theoretical and practical point is that the ZPC includes hundreds of local organizations and tens of thousands of individuals who take local initiatives in defending Israeli policy, its image and interests by trampling on the Constitutional and academic freedom of other Americans.

For every play which is banned, producer chastised and theater put in the red, thousands of other cultural workers and institutions are intimidated. They internalize the repressive codes imposed by the Zionists and self-censor. They submit to ZPC dictates of what can and cannot be performed, what is or is not offensive to ‘Jewish sensibilities’, that exquisitely stated euphemism for Zionist power.

Manifestations of Zionist cultural authoritarianism is found at the local level and is closely linked with national campaigns to monopolize the entire discussion of US Middle East policy, and in particular, to exclude any criticism of Israel and the powerful role of the Zionist Lobby. That monopoly is most evident in any systematic study of the op-ed pages of the big circulation print media and the panels of ‘experts’ included in the major broadcast media. The role of the pro-Israel repressive cultural-ideological hydra especially finds expression among the great majority of ‘progressive’ critics. ‘Marxist’ ideologues and ‘peace’ advocates deliberately and totally ignore the ZPC’s influence in Congress, the Executive and in cultural life. Instead they repeatedly criticize Bush, Cheney, the Republicans and Democrats without mentioning their prime movers among the hundreds of thousands of Zionist zealots and thousands of prime political donors. It is no wonder that the Zionist power configuration has greater power than any other lobby in Washington – they are the only power group which has no opposition, no organized group willing to name them, let alone challenge and fight their stranglehold over Congress. Worse still, some of the most influential critics of the war in Iraq provide ideological cover by denying the ZPC’s dominant role and deflecting attention to either non-existent war-makers (Big Oil) or to secondary political actors, who carry out Lobby initiatives.

Re-arming Clients: Washington and the ZPC’s War Machine Rolls On

The political-military setbacks inflicted on US-Israeli policy in the Middle East in 2006-2007 has not led to any moves toward serious diplomacy or negotiations. On the contrary the lessons drawn by Washington and Tel Aviv is to escalate the militarization of client groups and prepare for destructive civil and ethnic wars.

In response to the failure of the US-backed Israeli attack on Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah, Washington has been engaged in a large-scale rearming of right-wing Christian, Druze and Sunni militias in Beirut and throughout North-Central Lebanon (Guardian, April 11, 2007). The purpose is to provoke an armed conflict with Hezbollah which will force it to move its resistance fighters northward and weaken its defense of the Southern Lebanese border. A US-Israeli induced ‘civil war’ will, it is presumed, divide the Lebanese army and weaken any auxiliary role it might play in defending the country from Israeli cross border attacks or invasions. Given the widespread violence, resulting from a conflict, Israeli aircraft, now engaged in daily over-flights and reconnaissance would be free to bomb and destroy any and all reconstruction and Hezbollah defenses.

Israeli-backed American arming of a Palestinian military force led by longtime CIA collaborator, Mohammed Dahlen, working with ‘President’ Abbas, is advancing rapidly with the training of hundreds of officers in Jordan, pre-selected for political loyalty by Israeli and US officials. A heavily-armed force of 12,000 US-paid Palestinian mercenaries is being prepared to oust Hamas from power, destroy its police and defense forces and hunt down its leaders and intimidate its electoral supporters.

The Zionist lobby succeeded in inserting an extraordinary clause in Bush’s military aid to the Abbas faction in the Palestinian government. The lobby secured Israeli as well as US political screening of all Palestinian trainees before they are allowed to travel to Jordan for the US-funded training. In defense of the Jewish state’s right to oversee the administration of US military aid, the Lobby argued that the clause was necessary because of Israeli ‘fears’ – in other words – Israeli interests in retaining Palestine as a colony policed by Israeli screened Palestinian mercenaries (Adam Entous, Reuters News Service quoted in the Daily Alert, March 29, 2007.)

A Palestine destroyed by US-Israeli induced ‘civil strife’ will be in no position to negotiate any peace agreement that returns Israel to its pre-1967 borders. The idea is to establish a pro-US Palestinian-run police state within the territorial limits dictated by Israel.

The third area of militarization involves Northern Iraq where the US and Israel have financed the Kurdish military build-up. They politically support Kurdish separatists who for all intents and purposes operate as an independent state. According to Laura Rozen’s article, “Kurdistan: Covert Back Channels”, published in Mother Jones, April 12, 2007, the US and Israel support a willing Kurdish client in the plot to break up Iraq, impoverish Baghdad as its capital and set up Irbil as their capital. In June 2004, US top official Paul Bremer ‘transferred $1.4 billion US dollars from Iraq’s oil for food funds to the Kurds. Israeli ‘counter-terrorist’ training given to Kurdish security forces is used by Kurdish death squads under US direction in Northern Iraq and elsewhere. Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker (June 2004), stated that Israeli-trained Kurdish commandos infiltrate Iran and Syria. According to Rozen, the Mossad station chief Eliezer Geizi Tsafrir in Irbil, the ‘capital’ of Iraqi Kurdistan, set up a Kurdish intelligence service for the war-lord Mustafa Barzani. He is better known as the ‘rent-a-Kurd’ mercenary leader, who has served the US CIA, the former Shah of Iran and whoever else could pay him. The Kurds provide the bulk of what General David Petraeus has called ‘reliable Iraqi troops’ collaborating with the US colonial occupation forces. They have been active in infiltrating Iraqi resistance groups and fomenting ethnic-religious strife. They are responsible for the massive forced eviction of Iraqi Arabs, Turkomen and Assyrian Christians from Kirkuk and other multi-ethnic towns and cities in the north and repopulating them with Kurds. The Kurdish leaders in Northern Iraq have provided bases and arms for pro-US armed groups operating in Iran, Syria and Turkey, although the latter is without formal US approval. The Kurds serve as commandos and guides for US Special Forces engaged in assassination missions in Iran. The Kurds based in Northern Iraq are instructed to incite ‘separatist’ regional movements in Iran. With strong backing from the US, the Kurds have seized control of the rich oil wells in Kirkuk and surrounding areas, have signed oil contracts with European and US oil companies, de facto privatizing Iraqi public enterprises. The Kurds play a vital role in the US-Israeli strategy of breaking up Iraq into a multiplicity of mini-client entities divided by sectarian ethnic-religious identities with no influence in the region and incapable of ousting long-term US military bases in the country.

In the Horn of Africa, the US has armed and directed the Ethiopian client regime to restore the totally discredited ‘Transitional Regime’ to power in Mogadishu, killing over one thousand Somali civilians and displacing over 300,000 civilians during April-May 2007. The Ethiopian mercenary armed forces caused over $1.5 billion dollars in destruction with the advice of US Special Forces officers and Israeli counter-insurgency advisers. Once again, US policy is directed at destroying an Islamic country as much as it is defeating a potential political adversary – the Islamic Court Councils. Certainly the policy of relying on the military might of a hated Ethiopian dictator to invade and occupy Somalia has no possibility of creating a viable client regime. Washington’s quick resort to military escalation follows recent defeats and is preparatory to its forthcoming large-scale air war supplemented by mercenary ground attacks against Iran. This is where the ZPC comes into play as key policy makers and propagandists.

While one can debate whether the latest wave of US military escalation is the ‘dying gasp’ of a desperate empire, an irrational miscalculation by civilian militarists pursuing a military victory to bolster flagging domestic support or a continuation of long-standing imperial policies in the region, the fact remains that the principle domestic backer of the re-escalation strategy is the ZPC. No other organized political-economic forceconsistently supports all US military efforts in each of the zones of conflict. No other group backs US military action in countries where there is little or no oil. No other group totally ignores the ‘overstretch’ of the US military – the over-extension of US military forces in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa at the expense of providing military defense of other strategic imperial regions. Only the ZPC, of all theoretically possible influential ‘interest groups’ has put all countries – Islamic or secular – critical of Israel on the US’s military hit-list. Only the ZPC has orchestrated legislation to bar US financial institutions, pension funds and major oil and gas companies from lucrative investments in Arab and Persian markets. Not a single oil company has favored or benefited from the restrictive legislation on Iran authored by AIPAC, sponsored by Zionist Congressman Tom Lantos and approved by a Congress dominated by the Zionist ‘lobbies’ – the alphabet soup of organizations – whose prime reason for existence is to promote Israeli state power. Every big oil company in Europe and Asia opposes the US confrontational posture to Iran. As the Financial Times states, “Europe’s oil majors have plans to invest billions (in Iran) but US sanctions mean they are reluctant to go ahead.” (Financial Times May 10, 2007 p.2)

The self-styled ‘alternative’ Jewish lobbies, which claim to speak for liberal Jews critical of Israel, maintain that AIPAC is merely ‘one of many factors’ influencing US policy, in a  ‘complex mosaic of changing circumstances’. Using the argument of  ‘complexities’ and packaging the ZPC with ‘numerous groups’ they downplay or eliminate the essential role of the pro-Israel forces and join their mainstream brethren in smearing as ‘anti-Semite’ writers who put the ZPC at the center of their analysis of US policy toward Arab and Muslim countries. The liberal Zionists have a disastrous impact on the peace movement, by deflecting its attention away from a prime mover of US military policy and thus giving the ZPC an uncontested and open terrain for continuing their dominance of US Middle East policy. The liberal Jewish lobby willfully ignores Israeli geopolitical interests, Israeli reliance on military rather than diplomatic measures, its pursuit of ethnic cleansing and the ZPC influence on US policy, in terms of the methods and strategies that Washington should pursue. They deliberately and continuously ignore the opposition of all the major oil companies to US sanctions against Iran.

Conclusion

From 9/11 to the present, the pro-Israel power configuration has broadened its definition of ‘the areas of interest for Israel’, and thus the issues on which it will intervene, thus narrowing the parameters for discussion and policymaking in the US. By defining the limits of action that the US President and Congress can take on issues relating to Israel, the ZPC now influences US policies toward the entire Middle East. Today issues of war and peace, trade and investment agreements by US, European and Asian oil companies and banks in the Middle East, multi-billion dollar arms sales to Saudi Arabia are subject to ZPC scrutiny and veto. The new ‘broad definition’ of what effects Israel includes Lobby backing for Bush’s shredding of Constitutional restraints on his war powers. According to Zionist ideologues unleashing presidential authoritarianism at the service of Israeli extremism is no vice.

The Lobby’s concept of what ‘relates to Israel’ – its guiding light for intervening in US politics – has been stretched, along with Israel’s expanding interests. During the 1940’s to 50’s, the main focus of the Lobby was to secure US diplomatic support for Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The Lobby’s focus on areas of ‘interest to Israel’ extended to Israel’s wars with Egypt and Syria in the 1960’s and 1970’s; to Lebanon and Iraq during the 1980’s and 1990’s; and to Iraq and Iran during the current decade. The extension of the Lobby’s intervention in US Middle East politics mirrors Israel’s growing regional aspirations. But according to both Israel and its bucket carriers in the Lobby, it is not merely regional expansion which ‘interests Israel’ but economic and military aid and sales – namely who determines what military goods the US can sell to Arab states as well as what high end military technology the US should provide to the world’s second biggest arms merchant – Israel (which is also the US’s biggest arms export competitor).

What ‘relates to Israel’ involves the Lobby in intervening and determining the US votes in the United Nations, what pressures it will exert on the European Union in the Security Council, and how the White House should react to peace proposals from its clients in the Gulf states. As Jeff Blankfort correctly points out: every US President starting with Richard Nixon has attempted to pressure Israel to withdraw from land it occupied in 1967. And except for Jimmy Carter forcing Israel out of Sinai, Israel has successfully pressured the Israeli Lobby to mobilize the US Congress to end these presidential efforts. Today the ‘Israel Firsters’ do not have to ‘mobilize the Democratic Congress’ – they are automatically programmed to work for Israel, as is the US President. As former Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon once said: “We tell him (Bush) what to do, and he does it.”

The score card for the ZPC under the Bush Presidency and the Democratic Congressional majority is 10 for the Israel Lobby to 0 (zero) for the American People. These ’10 Points’ are:

1. No limits on the Presidential war agenda toward Iran.
2. No end of sanctions against Palestine
3. No arms sales to Saudi Arabia without Israeli approval.
4. No withdrawal from Iraq.
5. No land for peace agreement to end Israeli colonization of Palestine
6. No end of US escalation of troops in Iraq
7. No end to the power of the Lobby in making US Middle East policy
8. No end to Israeli spying on the US (its even called ‘free speech)
9. No end to the censoring of US cultural and intellectual work critical of Israel and to uncontested harassment of Muslims
10. Undisputed Judge and Jury of the beauty contest of US Presidential candidates.
11. No end to the Peace Movement’s silence and cover-up of the Lobby’s power over US Middle East policy.

James Petras‘ latest book is The Power of Israel in the United States (Clarity Press: Atlanta, 2006).  His forthcoming book, Rulers and Ruled (Bankers, Zionists and Militants) is being published by Clarity Press, Atlanta.

New dimensions of resistance to corporate globalization in India

Aseem Shrivastava

“It’s a terrible thing to be a worker exploited in the capitalist system. The only worse thing is to be a worker unable to find anyone to exploit you.” – Joan Robinson

A May Day disruption 

We were visiting Badli, a village of some 11,000 people, in the district of Jhajjar, Haryana, about 30 kms west of New Delhi’s International Airport. We were there to begin our research on the impact of the 25,000-acre Special Economic Zone (SEZ) planned in the area by Reliance Industries. Like in so many other parts of India where resistance to corporate plans is building up, farmers in the area have organized themselves into a Kisan Jagrukta Samiti (Farmers Awareness Committee) to battle Reliance.

It was May Day. The sun was harsh. Thus, the big meeting had been organized in the main Chaupal of the village. It was housed in a large quadrangle, the size of half a hockey field. The meeting was being held in the covered area which occupied half the courtyard. At least a few hundred farmers from about 20 villages were present. Dressed in white kurtas, and sporting turbans of the same shade, they looked at us with eyes wizened by the years. Being representatives of their respective panchayats, they were all elderly, their noble faces all bearing the stamp of long years of labor under the sun. This being patriarchal Haryana, there were no women present, apart from three of us, visitors from Delhi.

An army Captain from the area (who had taken early retirement in order to organize the villagers) had invited us to witness the May Day commemoration. Farmers were also expected to deliberate on the matter of the expected displacement in the wake of the acquisition of land by Reliance.

However, there was more than an understandable level of tension in the air. The Captain informed us that we could expect some trouble from local henchmen who had been bribed and instructed in advance to disrupt the meeting.

The meeting began and the pradhan of a neighboring village began proceedings with a five-minute denunciation of the SEZ policy of the government. In particular, he expressed regret and anger that the government was acting as the bichaula (land broker) for a private corporation, tempting farmers here, scaring them elsewhere, to sell their land for industrial development.

Barely had the pradhan finished his speech when a group of about 20 young men from the area, dressed very differently from their elders (in colorful shirts and trousers), suddenly appeared next to us and began telling us that most farmers were happily willing to part with their lands, that the men who had organized the meeting had already sold theirs and were now wanting Reliance to pay a higher compensation. As the next speaker on the podium began to make his speech they started heckling from the side, ultimately succeeding in shouting him down. They tried to provoke a fist-fight. Fortunately, they did not get the desired response.

The Captain and the elders decided wisely to suspend the meeting instead of beginning what would surely have turned into an ugly brawl. When we inquired into the identities of the thugs, it turned out that they were boys from the local area, many of them from Badli itself. Reliance had turned young and restless villagers into commission agents. It seems they had been given some petty sum of money and liquor the previous night to disrupt the meeting of the elders.

Who had paid them off? Local agents of Reliance, it turned out. They had also been promised “jobs” with the company once the SEZ came up. No interviews, no consideration of merit, skill or qualifications. It seemed that promises, backed with some small change, was enough to buy out the restless youth, eager for urban excitement.

After the meeting was adjourned, a much truncated number of farmers met a few kilometers away at the house of one of the local leaders. We were also invited to this small conclave. From what we heard there, this is the preliminary picture of the situation that appears to be emerging.

Hamari matribhumi (our mother earth) 

There is resentment amongst the farmers, even among those who have large holdings. Some of them are very angry. “Why don’t they find barren land far from here? What business does the government have to play broker?”

Many of the farmers who have sold their land are regretful, especially since land values are rising sharply in the area and they feel that they got a raw deal. “What are Rs.15 or 20 lakhs an acre when in nearby Gurgaon the price has shot up to Rs. 2 crores an acre?”, Mani Ram, a local peasant asked. Reliance wishes to take over 22 villages in Jhajjar and 18 in Gurgaon.

“Reliance agents are getting false affidavits made from farmers, saying that they need money for their children’s education, that their land is barren: banjar zameen. It’s interesting what they call banjar zameen: last year it produced 15-20 quintals of wheat! You can check the records at the revenue office”, Azad Singh of Badli told us.

Azad Singh was also skeptical of what people like him could do with the compensation money: “What we know best and have done all our lives for generations is farming. How do they expect us to change our occupation at this stage and run some sort of business? In any case, it should be our decision, not theirs. Why should we be condemned to disposability by people willing to shove some money into our pockets? If a hungry man is faced with a mound of cash and a plate of food, what will he pick?”

Most farmers are very reluctant to sell their land. Land is the only source of security and insurance in an agrarian context. While the company has targeted 25,000 acres – before the recent change in policy which has capped land acquisition for a single project at 5000 acres – accretion to the Reliance kitty has stalled for sometime at about 7000-8000 acres. There have been no sales of late.

Moreover, the land Reliance has acquired so far is in the form of far-flung plots. Reliance would clearly need the help of the Haryana government to achieve contiguity. In fact, The Times of India (May 2) reports that business lobbies are already asking the government to reconsider its recently announced policy amendment of not facilitating land acquisition for corporations, arguing that the government needs to step in at least to acquire the last 10% of the land, assuming corporations have themselves purchased the rest.

A resistance movement like in West Bengal? 

“And what will happen to those who do not own any land and work for daily wages on your fields?”, I asked Azad Singh. “Who can say? They are the most disposable of all”, he replied. There is an attempt by the farmers to draw the landless classes (30% of the population of the villages according to them) into their struggle. However, there did not seem to be enough of an effort to involve them. For instance, all the men present for the May Day meeting were farmers with land, some with a lot, some with little. There is a heroic attempt in the Samiti poster to accommodate the interests of the Scheduled Castes: it makes the demand that Reliance should give each of their families a plot of land in the SEZ! The Samiti poster also makes the demand that Reliance be leased the land by farmers rather than taking full possession of it.

It remains to be seen how/whether such disparate class-caste groupings jell together, even if the resistance is evidently building up. “There will be no SEZ construction here, we are not going to allow it”, the pradhan of Badli, Mahavir Singh said. “There are politicians who forget to wipe their faces after dipping them into malai(cream). Their days are numbered.”

A Haryana Kisan Mazdoor Sangharsh Samiti has been set up. One of its goals is khumbha ukkhado (pull out the electricity poles that Reliance has already begun putting in close to the KMP Expressway that is coming up close by). “Nandigram ki fasal taiyyar hai” (the crop of Nandigram is ready), Mahavir Singh told us.

Larger lessons 

The SEZ issue is at a crossroads. On the one hand, it is evident that the corporations cannot acquire all the land in most cases without governments coming to their rescue, taking recourse to the “public interest” clause in the Land Acquisition Act. Contiguity is a sine qua non for an SEZ and can’t be ensured without the help of the state, given the fragmentation of landholdings in the Indian countryside. On the other hand, following Nandigram the state has had to back off and say that it does not want to assist corporations in the process of acquiring land.

From the point of view of those becoming dispossessed, the issue is a vexed one too. On the one hand, the government’s role as a broker is very unpopular. On the other, if the government backs off, the land mafia takes over, as we saw happening in Badli. What should the government do? It must obviously align its coercive apparatus with the protection of vulnerable farmers and their land. This is also the least likely thing to happen. Thus, conflict is inevitable.

In the larger perspective of corporate globalization, the experience of the Indian countryside is repeatedly bringing out the historical truth that the resistance to it is coming more from those who globalization (thanks to its labor-displacing technological armour) is making redundant, rather than from those who will have the opportunity of getting exploited by global capital. The numbers of those – peasants, sharecroppers, agricultural workers, tribals, Dalits and others outside the organized sector of the economy – exceed by orders of magnitude those industrial and high-skilled workers who can catch a tumbling crumb from the table of galloping growth. It is they who are more likely to challenge the corporate juggernaut that the elites have unleashed.

Aseem Shrivastava is an independent writer. He can be reached at aseem62@yahoo.com.

Ebrahim Harvey

We may well be on the cusp of a dramatic breakthrough in leftist South African politics. For the first time, the South African Communist Party (SACP) – the decades-old slavishly loyal ally of the ruling African National Congress – is on a course of action whose internal and inevitable logic is a likely and even probable split with it. Its recent rapid growth of membership to a reported figure of about forty thousand comes in the wake of a discernable radicalisation in its ranks amidst a growing crisis in the ANC alliance around its leadership, the close, cosy and conniving relations between the ANC, government and big business – white and black – and the devastating socioeconomic effects the government’s current neo-liberal policies have had on the black working class in particular. There are many other elements to this crisis, which only exacerbate it: rising black unemployment, grinding poverty, the unresolved and still-smouldering Khutsong debacle, spreading and ravaging HIV/Aids, a basic income grant that the ANC still resists but millions hope for, poor or often absent basic services, the explosive presidential succession battles and much more.

That is why the current juncture is bound to go beyond the earlier tiring and incessant speculations about the fate and future of a long-standing but deeply troubled alliance whose strategic purpose has not only been exhausted but under the impact of neo-liberalism has become a serious hindrance to the fulfillment of the party’s socialist objectives, which it shares with its other ally, the Congress of South African Trade Unions. In fact it is evident that in order to prevent a split within the SACP the top leadership has been forced to project a more militant stance recently to contain growing radicalisation in its own ranks, epitomised by a strong call to stand in future elections on an independent platform. So strong was this voice that the party leaders were compelled to institute a commission of enquiry into it. This was unprecedented and the first serious indication of a split that is not necessarily impending but very difficult to avoid because this time the signs are unmistakably more serious and the conjuncture more potentially cataclysmic, and therefore likely to resist the shaky patchwork senior alliance leaders periodically engage in. Deeper, complex and more intractable issues are increasingly beyond the conscious control of leaders of all parties to the alliance and subject instead to growing internal mass pressures. The demand by many in the SACP to independently participate in future elections and the mass support for former deputy president Jacob Zuma, rightly or wrongly, must be seen in this light.
The stakes are high on all sides of the tripartite equation. It is clearly impossible that the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) will be unaffected by these developments for various reasons. Most notable of these is that there is a long-standing and close relationship and a significant overlapping of executive membership between it and the party, which will most likely translate into a unified vision regarding the matters that has in the first place brought the alliance to the present crisis: autocratic ANC leadership, neo-liberal policies and so on. This can only mean that the fate and future of the SACP within the alliance is inextricably linked to that of Cosatu in the present crisis. To imagine a resolution of the crisis that results in a political, ideological and strategic divergence between the two is very unlikely, if their common interests and relations over the years is anything to go by.

This means that if the SACP later finds that it is necessary and desirable to enter future elections independently this will probably be endorsed by Cosatu. The consequential logic of this is that the ANC for the first time will be faced with by far the most serious threat to its rule since 1994, from its own allies, an irony that cannot escape us. Unlike the virtual impossibility of the Democratic Alliance, the official opposition, beating the ANC at the polls, the combined weight of Cosatu and the strategic influence of the SACP could even under propitious conditions result in an electoral defeat of the ANC. Because Cosatu by far brings the biggest electoral chunk of support to the ANC the mind boggles at the prospects in sight if it and the SACP joined hands on a common electoral platform against the ANC.

Combine this prospect with the most likely deepening of the crisis it would have within the ruling ANC itself and we can see that indeed that a decision by the SACP to enter elections independently could have cataclysmic political consequences for both the alliance and the country. Therefore, it is fairly easy to argue that it is impossible to envisage a separate electoral platform for the SACP and Cosatu without splitting the alliance right down the middle. In fact if such a decision were taken it would signal not only the irreversible split of the alliance under current circumstances, but it will deepen existing antagonisms and unleash new ones. To imagine that the ANC would tolerate a continuance of the alliance after such a decision is made is the height of political fantasy. Such are the serious implications of the present conjuncture but faced with their mounting frustrations and impotence within the alliance a road they may well take.

Furthermore, if such prospects were realised it will decisively change the face of leftist politics in this country and most likely result in the further weakening of the left outside the ANC alliance or alternatively its merger with or absorption into a new leftist realignment or coalition. We truly live in interesting times.

Ebrahim Harvey is a political writer and former Cosatu unionist.

Ebrahim Harvey 

South Africa is once again on the verge of a public sector strike. Has the government not learnt the many-sided adverse consequences of earlier strikes, which took a heavy toll on service delivery in all the relevant sectors, employee morale and severely damaged union and public confidence in government?

Already this country is going through a social crisis of unprecedented proportions. A public sector strike at this point is bound to worsen this crisis, including more generally relations between the unions and government and more specifically between the ruling party and its allies. But it is also precisely because of this crisis that workers require a real and meaningful “living wage” to counter spiralling cost of living increases – especially that which is going to follow the recent highest-ever fuel increase – and the fact that the inflation rate does not capture all the real costs of living and often underestimate costs even for those indices it does consider. All progressive economists know this and in fact so does the government, but it persists in strictly tying unions down to inflation rates and resisting real increases above the inflation rate.

However, unlike strikes in the private sector, such as in mining and manufacturing, public sector strikes are much more politically loaded and sensitive because it pits the unions and government – as their employer – against each other and more directly and forcefully raise critical issues about the meaning of democracy, the nature of this government and the kind of society we live in. But more than that it publicly highlights the macroeconomic limitations of neo-liberal budgetary constraints, which fail to adequately appreciate the enormously important role public sector workers play in the economy and society and the great sacrifices they make.

Government has had a narrow financial and monetarist approach to annual wage negotiations, which does not adequately consider key questions of staff morale, working environment, job performance, productivity and more importantly the quality of services the public receives. The fact that these workers serve members of the public, in their capacity as nurses, teachers and so on, does not seem to matter much to the government. It is widely known in the labour movement that staff morale affects their interactions with members of the public. Workers dissatisfied with wages and working conditions tend to take it out on members of the public – the people they are most immediately in touch with daily. And though this cannot be condoned and neither can it be simply and only attributed to pay and working conditions, there can be no doubt that these factors play a big part in relations between employees and the public.

And what about many other possible consequences of conflict-ridden public sector strikes, such as violence and injury – especially when union feelings and convictions run high because of an unyielding final government offer – and the huge inconvenience and dangers to health and safety public sector strikes can lead to? Then there is the fact that experiences here and internationally show that depending on which sectors of the public sector come out on strike, how critical it is to the daily functioning of society and how long it lasts tends collectively to further strain relations with members of the public who are denied services or only that which skeletal staff make possible. The public and communities also get badly divided between those who support the strike and those who oppose it for whatever reasons.

Furthermore, when a democratically elected government refuses reasonable wage demands and other conditions of service improvements what message does it send to the private sector when they have such negotiations? The international trends here too tend to lead to a tougher stance adopted by these employers. Overall labour relations tend to suffer and the acrimony does not end when finally a settlement not on favourable terms to workers is reached. No, the unresolved tensions get transferred to the workplace, with strained relations affecting morale, productivity and absenteeism. In fact the whole of society, beyond the workplace, suffers hugely from public sector strikes, and often the damage lasts long and gets carried into the next year’s negotiations.

On the whole it would appear that while the government might think they gain financially by adopting a tough and unyielding stance during negotiations the fact is that they lose -and potentially more – in the areas mentioned, losses which go beyond financial calculations. The earlier lengthy, damaging and costly public sector strikes in both the UK and this country should elicit a more open, progressive and preventative stance by the government, but it has not, unfortunately because of the severe fiscal constraints neo-liberalism has placed it under. The same fiscal constraints determine poor municipal standards of services, based on the barest minimalism, retrenchments in the public sector, lack of basic equipment in schools and hospitals and poor maintenance.

And it is patently unfair for the government to annually in advance budget a fixed percentage increase, because negotiation is hamstrung from the outset by such pre-determined and often unyielding limits or minor and token shifts, which contradicts the purpose and spirit of negotiations. Flexibility, especially in the main wage component, is necessary, especially when lack of progress on this key point not only delays reaching agreement on other conditions of service demands but negatively affects settlement on these, especially when negotiations are approached as a total package.

It is furthermore deeply ironical that while President Thabo Mbeki, ministers and other senior politicians – employed by the state – have been awarded huge increases recently by a special commission, the unions have been told that the government can only offer less than half – 5.7 percent – of their wage demand of 12 percent. Other demands were rejected outright. On top of this, the government wants to secure a 4-year agreement at such a low base.

Instead of working with unions to build a strong public sector – amidst ongoing pressures to commercialise and privatise more of its activities – we have yet another strike looming on the horizon. Let us hope that a more sensible approach by the government in the weeks ahead can prevent the strike that appears imminent. After all, public sector workers and their families have already suffered much from massive retrenchments over the past few years, from which they have yet to recover, and the daily pressures of staff shortages and resultant overwork. They fully deserve a much better wage offer that that currently on the table. If there is a strike the government must take responsibility for it and whatever consequences that leads to.

Ebrahim Harvey is a political writer and former COSATU unionist.

Soumitra Bose

Specially Enclosed Zones for forming Capital through production or servicing within a nation-state and without the encumbrances of law of the native land is what gets called as Special Economic Zone (SEZ). What speciality of Economy this zone is going to provide is hazy not only from the content point of view but even from every angle of view one looks at it. Can a nation state, by definition, have multiple “economies” within its territorial boundary? Can an “Economy” be quantified through any stretchable definition of qualification as one co-existing with “others”? Is the usage of “Economy” over determined by factors other than “Economy” or if not then where is the line drawn to distinguish the exchange mechanism or production process or evenproduction relation with the regulating rules relating to human rights, social benefits and even simple polity of the nation-state?

The concept of enclosed space has changed its point of incidence. Marx saw an enclosed space as a catchment basin from where cheap labour will be evicted and culled in to work in industries. Labourers from not specialized but specially charted out areas will be brought in to the most “advanced” type of production relation or that is what will be touted. In reality it will never be the most advanced type of production relation but will have the most advanced type of surplus extraction from the labourers. In Marx’s days, the entire nation-state territorial space was the hearth of the Capital, spaces were enclosed and insulated to juice out the labour power, evict them, make them readily available for the Capital sector- today in SEZ the enclosed space is the special sector of Capital, whatever we have outside is the area from which labour power will be uprooted, evicted and made available for the “enclosed spaces”. This very specific nature of the transposition requires a huge space or innumerable middle range spaces to be declared as the SEZ where the “advanced” Capital will establish the most advanced form of labour extraction, rent extraction and super-profit extraction. This would be the most “advanced” form of not production relation but of extraction relation. That too let us harbour no illusion that advanced might mean sophisticated. Sophistication would have brought in more organic composition of Capital that in turn would have meant advanced organic composition both in Fixed Capital and in variable capital.. In addition to adding more machines in the production process more technical composition of Capital would have to be brought in the personal skills of the labourers and daily tools used by the labourers. Let us be very clear that no such thing is going to be the essential part within the case study of the production process within SEZ. We must also not overlook that the SEZ may not have any production coming out at all. It could be a simple centre for hospitality, and centre for entertainment. We might call that as production, but no one will deny that no Capacity will be built up. No means of production may be produced. Special Economic Zone would therefore attain some credential in its description because it is a different kind of animal of economy that is going to be garnered here, one that does not require that profit and super-profit comes out of the Capital invested in some or the other production process.

Primitive accumulation of Marx’s description has essentially come back and is active. Capitalism has created within itself sub-sectors and shows partiality on one over the other. At this day today, agriculture is not outside the Capital project, nor is small scale industries or even what gets called as the Sunset or traditional industries. Capital is moving towards a regime of a different and a more restricted kind of Capital formation in one or two preferred sub-sectors at the cost of her other sub-sectors. Moribund nature of Capital is still a convincing proposition because the project of Capital has therefore become more skewed, focussed and living off itself. Agriculture had just started to form Capital with the newer machines and factor inputs. Agricultural produces then were just getting forwardly linked to other processed products and even giving rise to large scale mass consumer products.  Agro-industry had a possibility of taking a dangerous turn through GM food industry [cash crop] but could equally have taken a rather desirable route of developing retail-food consumer industry. Retail industry in India has been very conservatively poised to be flourishing up to Rs 28 billion in the next two to three years based on the present production capability. The huge potential of the augmented production and processed production would have transgressed even into the so-called traditional near-static realm of the security food production. Cereal too had shown all signs of becoming a viable and very important cash crop. Economy based on the agricultural showed the promise of becoming the most spread out and most popular industry and yes, even heavy industry there too. The agricultural equipment building up capital industry, the storage industry, the preservative industry, the processing mills industry, the distribution and Just-In-Time supply chain all these had the possibility of being the best optimized network in the human history. Capital, and especially Capital in the third world had chosen to ignore that route and go for what it perceives as a faster track of building up SEZ on some low graded low skill assembling industry and hospitality industry. It has chosen to ruin down even all present capabilities of agricultural and agro-industries and for the sake of realty industry- this is the famous python eating off its own tail. That is the very specific nature of the accelerating rate of moribundity of Capital.

“Primitive Accumulation process” had accumulated Capital through accumulating the sources of Capital that is labour, in turn labourers had to be provided, that created more jobs and more distributed income and therefore more small savings.  The present day SEZ-patterned neo-modern primitive capital or what we may term as predatory capital is evicting producing farmers to snatch their land, render them jobless and provision less and skill less gradually. The only thing that is extracted of them in this SEZ is the cheap labour without any strings attached. The whole logic of enclosing the other way around has come up simply due to this narrow objective of extracting the cheapest possible labour without bothering about the provisions given to them for keeping them alive and work-worthy for the next day. The traditional definition of wage comes into question here. What therefore the labourers in SEZ would get is a diminutive form of wage that is destined to go down progressively. This downward shift in wage or remuneration may be in real terms or in nominal terms (in absolute terms or in terms of inflation adjusted basis), but the lowering down of the wage down the tenure is a fact nonetheless. The Enclosing is done also to avoid the competitive wage war between different companies within one industry – that is why it is predatory. The enclosure ensures physical insulation from intra-industry competition, intra-market vagaries and cross-industry side effects. Enclosure establishes a corporate fiefdom on the production process and is eked out to be isolated from the general society or the production environment of the surroundings and the nation-state in consideration. This is the crux of the benefit that globalised Capital gets from any SEZ – regardless of the ontological position of the industry, its standard, organic composition, technical composition, labour law, democratic polity, comparative advantage or disadvantage or general labour market, any enclosed zone can be prepared with the exact desired level of input-mix and then packet it as one single product exactly right for maximum profit extraction. The entire process of production is now a product and a package. SEZ is the one package comprising the product that is sold in the market (service, solution or material product), service that goes along with it. The market however is usually not the open market; it is a specific market in a distant territory or a link in the forward chain of an end product. The market therefore does not have the immunity to withstand on its own as an independent product and is solely dependent on a parent firm in some distant metropolitan region. The product is the optimized output-mix with the lowest variable capital or labour involved. SEZ abhors among other things any kind of normal market competition. Here comes the specific import and necessity of SEZ distinct from any producing firm. The enclosure then extends to every aspect of life for the labourer and gets in or out of the enclosure as per the profit consideration of the owner of the SEZ. Labourers may pour in the SEZ every day and pour out at the end of the work or they may be interned.

Colonisers colonised the native land through gradual occupation of cities and then moved on to the feeding base for those city markets and eventually the whole territory. SEZ is a mechanism very similar to that kind of project with the only difference that every SEZ is different from the other and for all other life carrying activities it has to depend on the unenclosed area – the “other”. Capital is a social relation is what Marx opined and went further to say that it transforms every human relationship into itself. SEZ does the same thing with a more wholesome form.

This phenomenon brings us to the perusal of the business model of SEZ. The entire all-engulfing market lies “outside” the SEZ – it lies out there, out in the “other”. Even if for hypothetical consideration we consider there are infinite numbers of individually insignificant SEZs, individual SEZ is not capable of changing the nature of the overall SEZ scenario within a nation state. There is a proposal to visualize the whole of India as a conglomeration of SEZs – then there would be a virtual SEZ market where each individual SEZ would be a product by itself. In that condition each individual SEZ would not need any protection or special insulation from the others, it could have competed with the other SEZs. Well! That is the paradox, here. So SEZ cannot be innumerable in numbers, it has to be limited and thus it has to survive by primitive accumulation of the labour power from the “other” sector – or the normal nation-state economy sector. This is the reason why the great Capitalist China moving with a firm double digit GDP has now restricted the number of SEZ into only 6 big ones and are now slowly tightening the leash through promulgating more and more restrictive laws. Latin America has abandoned any concept of SEZ and it is only India and especially the so-known Indian parliamentary left that is full agog with SEZ concept. The dependence of SEZ on the “other” for its sustenance is not only the limiting factor in its sustenance and growth but it is also the nemesis. The growth rate in an SEZ project is bound theoretically to go down and eventually (not asymptotically) reach the zero level and head towards being negative. SEZs are bound to turn red in various time tenures, but by that time it will take down along with the entire neighbourhood, the ecology, the producing potential, and aggravate chaos and anarchy exponentially. SEZ is a fast loosing proposition in any medium to long term. A product lasts only its life cycle. Even if it is insulated from the competition and general market obsolescence, the life span of a product can only be extended but doom it will! An SEZ, as it depends on one product or one service or one type of solution or a few collections of it, has to face the same track history of that of a product. SEZ in a long term is nothing but a bankruptcy generating, devastating device creating social, political, cultural and demographic land mines. After a couple of bouts or life cycles of a set of SEZ, the whole land, labour will lose its recycle ability and desert will it render. And right here in this consideration the future value of the Capital is loosing. Every marginal productivity unit measure of unit Capital will fetch progressively lower and lower value. The short term apparent gain will be for the nation-state a gradual drain in the pent up wealth that human civilization has kept on providing all these years- it is therefore a project plan with a diminishing return. SEZ baffles the country’s statistic and metric by short-term spurts but just like administering steroids it kills slowly the country in any middle to long-term tenure – it is Capital de-formation on a longer tenure- a bad proposition!

The entire concept of bundling up of the ancillary industries with the production unit of the principal product is a loosing proposition. Had this business case been successful then from the profit point of view the forward integration would have been more profitable and then again the conglomerate behemoth model of the mid twentieth century would come back. The separation of core production unit from the ancillaries brings success only when the ancillaries cater to various competitive firms within the same industry. SEZ organization inhibits that. Even if it allows such outward journey of intermediate products the transportation advantage will not be achieved and the concept of optimum supply chain will not be achieved. The concept of down stream production chain can never live long by supplying to one or a few pre-ordained customers. Any change in the order pattern would jeopardize the organization and sustenance of the ancillary firm and would turn it red. With the bringing down of the feeders the main firm will go red- this is an over determined process of doom and bankruptcy.

SEZ is an enclosed space subsidized by the government and exempted from paying the excise duties and various other normal taxes. If the number of such SEZ units grows then the nation-state will be loosing the potential income, whereas the financial institutions and private or public venture capital concerns will invest money in those. With every additional SEZ in the country the marginal productivity of one invested dollar loses its comparative sheen after the number of SEZs had reached a critical number. A country cannot sustain that as the public funds will soon be depleted of its operating generated own fund from domestic operations. They will have to borrow in money from financial institutions beyond the nation-state boundary. This fund comes along with interest tags. The interest money that will be paid is nothing but the portion of the super-profit generated from regular Capital operations. With the increase of tenure and amount, the super-profit will turn into a rent and will be siphoned off the nation-state boundary dipping the nation-state into perennial economic and thus political in-sovereignty.

SEZ needs a continuous inflow of Capital unless all its products are to be bought back. In the case of being bought back the firm loses the freedom of the market price and is bound to move towards a decelerating growth rate and faced with the inflationary nation-state economy this plateaued out growth rate would be in real terms go down over a longer period. In the case of no such obligation of being bought back the firm has to depend on the outside market and the cost of acquiring new business would be going up as more and more SEZ firms throughout the world would pour in products- in this case too the rate of return is diminishing and the entire advantage of protection and subsidy dies off. Please note this is not the general neo-con logic of free market because in an SEZ the only UPS of the final product is the cheap labour that does not grow in quality or value. Going down the value chain never fetches any medium to long-term guarantee to the producing firm. In a normal nation-state competing market protectionism at the inception hours helps stabilize the company through giving it enough fail-over during which it hones on to the value proposition and becomes capable of fighting with the external open market- that is the interest pursued by the nation-states in building up its own army of competing industries. In an SEZ case the native nation-state subsidizes revenue and does not build up any value proposition. It remains dwarf and always dies outside the incubator.

In any nation-state economy then walking over to the international market place, revenue earned strengthens the native currency against the international basket of standard currency of the SDR (Special Drawing Rights). This is simply because the repatriation is inward within the native state. In SEZ it is mostly repatriated abroad or the revenue earned is used to import foreign goods. Hard currencies bob up the countries reserve for a very short while and depletes that again as fast as it came. The foreign direct investments come in a normal market as well as in an SEZ with strings attached. As long as the domestic market is not very strong and demanding for finished industrial products FDIs are always traps. Companies will only come to the native country when they find very higher marginal returns to their dollars that again entails their getting lured by the strength and volume of the native-market. The entire credit money of the WEST would require a producing economy outside the credit capital or debt capital generating sector that can SERVE the credit offered- this is the monetary aspect of the primitive accumulation. The (M3-M1) of the WEST will be served by the M1 of the EAST.

The FIIs extract interest that gets compounded. The serving potential of a native country’s operative profit goes down with every additional native dollar earned through one more unit of labour spent in the native economy. With all these the metropolitan market or the market in the west uses the native space as a space sub-serving its main product that is either produced or designed within the WEST and the biggest chunk of the sales revenue minus the operating cost goes over to the Western owner either through patents, or through owning intellectual property or through design consultancy fees. The smaller portion that comes to the native country goes to pay for the labour and the acquisition cost. With every such unit sales-revenue the differential of the Western and the Eastern allocation yawns up more and more creating an ever skewed distribution. The absolute value of the production-sales-repatriation cycle looks exciting from the native stand point in the beginning years and then figures out that it is loosing the relative value proposition competing with the WESTERN peer or the WESTERN co-producer. The value game becomes, if not war but definitely a contention of attrition.

What is the benefit of getting into SEZ then? If it is so gloomy then why all comprador corporates of the native nation-state are rushing towards this obvious doom? Yes, there is some gain; however effervescent, however fleeting there are some thrills there, but they are there as long as the overall picture is not paid attention to, as long as the collective is not taken into consideration, as long as the individual rivalries enthral the individual players without any heed to the collective doom. The euphoria of chaos, the ecstasy of anarchy, the elixir of crossing interests and the moto of contention of killing others to survive, living for a short while, for a fast buck and for cravenness for speed is what SEZ would offer- it is the same attitude that goads homo sapiens to consumerism, to over-accumulation and needless possessiveness. People frenzy as if there is no tomorrow, and Capital leads human and every relationship generating from humans into a simulacrum of no-tomorrow! Capital is the only tomorrow!

The faster a third world producing and thriving economy would SEZise itself the longer would the WEST survive and the better would it. We saw the vaporising of the Asian tigers with only surplus reserves into basket cases and tourism destinations slipping down to providing solace to worn heels of the WEST. We experienced how famous industrial centres of countries like India (Durgapur-Asansol-Ranigunge belt, Gaziabad belt, Old Mumbai belt, Steel plant colonies) turned from high skilled settlements into almost deserts within the last 4 decades or so, we experienced how new and promised lands lost their crown to newer up-comers. We also saw how producing economies and sectors are giving way to service sector and entertainment gizmos and eating away the best of the brains and wisdom into brain and skill drain.

The SEZ offers its owners a nice prelude to the Capital flight they would carry along and stash in the financial institutions abroad, to have a nicer life for may be one life time (without any consideration to their progeny) comparable to their western compatriots before the native-country ever dreams to have a convertible currency regime. The owners do not want to take any chances, if the native country sinks they are afloat transmigrated and transmuted into citizens of the world and in particular of the western world. If the country shores up for a while then they will come back to reclaim their ancestral rights as sons and daughters to the soil, they will then enjoy a cheaper economy and again the moment the signal turns amber they would take the next flight out. SEZ is that space ensuring a safer proposition of Capital flight off the native land to the promised metropolitan. Who paid for all these? Don’t even dare to ask – of course those half clad, half fed, lesser children of native land, those who never could wake up to comprehend their rightful claim. Here speed is the Mantra – the faster you can fly befooling the producers the smarter you are! SEZ is that smart contraption that takes the owner places and takes the producer-labour for a song!!!