Reconciliation in Haiti Part 1

The Haitian National Truth and Justice Commission was created on December 1994 by an executive order issued by President Jean Bertrand Aristide.

The nation now known as Haiti has the great misfortune to occupy a location far too close to the nation now known as the USA. December 5 1492 was a bad day for the Taino, an Arawakan people. Christopher Columbus, who was looking for India, stumbled upon the island the Taino  called Ayiti. Columbus claimed the island for the Spanish Crown, naming it La Isla Española (“the Spanish Island”), which was later changed to Hispaniola.

Colonisation

The Spaniards did not bring their own women with them. They took Taíno women for their wives. Rape of Taino women  was common. The 1518 Smallpox epidemic killed 90% of the natives who had not already perished.  By 1548 the native population was under 500. Spanish interest in Hispaniola began to wane in the 1520s, as more lucrative gold and silver deposits were found in Mexico and Peru. Nevertheless, up to the 1550s, the Spanish imported large numbers of black African slaves to labour in the gold mines and sugar plantations. Dutch traders/pirates joined their English and French brethren trading on the remote coasts of Hispaniola.

In the 18th century it became France’s most valuable possession; on the eve of the French Revolution, it was supplying two-thirds of all of Europe’s tropical produce. Santo Domingo, as it was then called, was a brutally efficient slave colony.

Slavery

Peter Hallward, of King’s College Cambridge, wrote in New Left Review: “The structural basis of Haiti’s crippling poverty is a direct legacy of slavery and its aftermath.” By 1681, there were 2,000 slaves. A hundred years later there were 500,000 slaves and perhaps 700,000 offspring of masters and slaves. A third of new arrivals died within a few years. There were only 40,000 whites who had to use harsh measures to keep control over such large numbers. Religion was important. All slaves had to practise Catholicism and native African religions were suppressed.

Revolt

Voodoo ceremonies with animal sacrifices were conducted  in secret and fomented revolt. According to tradition, after a ceremony on August 14 1791, a slave overseer and hougan (voodoo priest) called Dutty Boukman gave the signal and slaves from a dozen plantations slaughtered their masters and their families. The revolt spread. The slaves had learnt cruelty from their masters. In her book The Rainy Season, Amy Wilentz writes: “The masters had stuffed gunpowder into slaves’ rectums and exploded it. They had rolled their slaves in spiked barrels down hills, they had whipped them and tied them to boards and left them in the swamps to be eaten alive by ants and mosquitoes. The slaves repaid these favours in 1791 by decapitating the masters, raping their wives on top of their bloodied corpses, chopping off their arms and legs, sawing them in half, impaling their infants on proudly carried spikes”.

There had been a revolution in France also. In 1792, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax was sent by the French Legislative Assembly to maintain French control of Saint-Domingue, stabilize the colony, and enforce the social equality recently granted to free people of color by the National Convention of France. In  1793, Sonthonax proclaimed  the freedom of the slaves and in 1794 French National Convention abolished slavery by law in France and all its colonies.

White colonists continued to fight Sonthonax, with assistance from the British. They were joined by many of the free men of color who opposed the abolition of slavery. Toussaint Louverture and his corps of well-disciplined, battle-hardened former slaves came over to the French Republican side in early May 1794.

With the colony facing a full-scale invasion by Britain, the rebel slaves emerged as a powerful military force, under the leadership of Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe. Louverture successfully drove back the British and by 1798 was the ruler of the colony. He asserted enough independence to persuade Napoleon to send forces to increase French control. Word began to reach the colony of the French intention to restore slavery. The French burned alive, hanged, drowned, and tortured black prisoners, reviving such practices as burying blacks in piles of insects and boiling them in cauldrons of molasses. After one battle, Rochambeau buried 500 prisoners alive; Dessalines responded by hanging 500 French prisoners. Rochambeau’s brutal tactics helped unite black, mulatto, and mestizo soldiers against the French.

Revolution and Republic

Louverture was kidnapped and taken away to a prison in the Jura. He died of exposure and tuberculosis in 1803. In November 1803, the former slaves won the war’s final battle, and on 1 January 1804 Dessalines declared independence, reclaiming the indigenous Taíno name of Haiti (“Land of Mountains”) Hemmed in by slave colonies, Haiti had only one non-colonised neighbour, the slaveholding United States, which refused to recognise its independence.

Dessalines massacred 2,000 Frenchmen at Cap-Français, 900 in Port-au-Prince, and 400 at Jérémie. He issued a proclamation declaring, “we have repaid these cannibals, war for war, crime for crime, outrage for outrage.”

Reconciliation in Canada

And yet where in your history books is the tale

Of the genocide basic to this country’s birth?
–Buffy St. Marie

Readers of this series may be surprised to learn that Canada has a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Canada has the image of a civilised beacon for human rights. In Transparency International’s latest Corruption Perception Index Canada comes in at a saintly number nine compared to UK’s 17, USA’s 19 and Sri Lanka’s 79. Canada is never shy of berating Sri Lanka on human rights.

Why does Canada need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission? Actually, the TRC is focused on a specific issue rather than on human rights in general. In June 2008, the Canadian government undertook an effort to understand the history, abuses and intergenerational impact of the Indian Residential School (IRS) system that operated in Canada for over 100 years.

The IRS system consisted of a nation-wide network of church- and state-run schools focused on separating  indigenous (First Nation, Inuit, and Métis)  children from their cultural heritage. From 1920 into the 1960s, attendance was mandatory for aboriginal children aged 7 to 15. Priests and Indian Agents forcibly removed many children from their families and sent them to the schools. It is estimated that more than 150,000 children went through these schools.

Children were severely punished if they used their native language. Food and medical services were inadequate. Overcrowding contributed to the spread of disease. The mortality rate for residential school students was 40%. Children were often subjected to severe physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.

One theory suggested that the name of Canada came from the Spanish cá nada,  meaning there is nothing there. There may have been no gold or silver but there were people. Scientists believe  that bones and artefacts prove  First Nations people have lived in what is now Canada for more than  12,000 years.

Canadian prosperity has long been tied to the existence of an “extractive frontier” where population densities were very low, and natural resources were abundant, untapped and essentially free. Inexpensive access to new lands depended upon a policy of keeping Aboriginal peoples separate and unequal, with neither the rights nor the power to demand full value for their labour and materials – or the land which was stolen from them.

 

According to Reverend Kevin Daniel Annett, there was a “Canadian Holocaust” and mainstream Christian churches were and are complicit in it. Annett claims  that the total number of aboriginals killed in the Canadian genocide by the British Crown is approximately 25 million people. Annett claims that over 50,000 aboriginal children are still missing and unaccounted for from the residential schools operated by the Catholic and other churches on behalf of the British Crown. Many believe that Annett is a charlatan or a madman. (He does bear a remarkable resemblance to mad poet Robert Lowell!).

How do the descendents of those people who occupied Canada 12,000 years ago fare today? The effects of the forced introduction of European culture and values, the dispossession of Aboriginal lands, and the imposition of alien modes of governance are still felt today. Underlying the problems of poverty, poor health and substance abuse is a loss of identity and helplessness from having their values oppressed and their rights ignored.

As of the 2006 census, there were 1,172,790 Aboriginal people in Canada, or 3.8% of the national population. In 1995, 55.6% of Aboriginal people living in Canadian cities were poor. 52.1% of all Aboriginal children were poor in 2003. First Nations people experienced a disproportionate burden of many infectious diseases. Similarly, the tuberculosis rate among First Nations people remained eight to ten times that seen in the Canadian population as a whole. Only 56.9% of homes were considered adequate in 1999­.

In 2012 three UN expert committees rated Canada’s  performance on meeting rights commitments — and found it wanting. An Amnesty International report found “a range” of “ongoing and serious human rights challenges,” especially for indigenous peoples. There was a disproportionate number of missing or murdered indigenous women on Vancouver’s downtown East Side from 1997-2002, and their cases did not receive equal treatment by police. AI says that UN recommendations have too often been ignored, and the implementation process is so “cloaked in secrecy” that most Canadians have no idea whether the government plans to act on them. Meghan Rhoad, women’s rights researcher for Human Rights Watch said that “the epidemic of violence against indigenous women and girls in Canada is a national problem and it demands a national enquiry.”

An interviewer who met Annett described his “unexpected demeanour and the intelligent clarity of his words”.  She  asked him what he wanted. “A war crimes trial. Returning the children’s remains, first of all, for a proper burial”.

Rather similar to what Canada wants from Sri Lanka. Canada has had longer to think about it.

A Tale of Two Wars

Last week I watched a film which began with  a realistic depiction of violent  combat at the end of a brutal secessionist civil war. There was no glory in this combat. This was hand to hand, opposing troops rolling around in filthy mud, hacking at each other, kicking faces and stabbing guts at close quarters.

There was much talk throughout the movie of a 13^th amendment to the Constitution.

The movie was Lincoln. That particular 13^th Amendment related to the abolition of slavery. Lincoln needed a two-thirds majority in the legislature.

J. David Hacker, a demographic historian, has recalculated the death toll of the American Civil War, and increased it by more than 20%.  His  estimate of the number of dead up to 850,000 – which Hacker says  means the social impact is about 37,000 more widows, and 90,000 more orphans than previous  estimates.

One commentator says: the film tells us about the “messy reality of governance, and about a democratic process run by flawed mortals whose noble aims often require ignoble means.” True north is essential, the president tells a congressman, but you also have to navigate “the swamps and deserts and chasms along the way”. If you can’t do that, he asks, “what’s the good of knowing true north?”

Patronage-peddling is given a comic spin in Tony Kushner’s screenplay and Spielberg’s direction. The wiles of “Bilbo” (James Spader) and his group are underlined with comical music to make us laugh at their techniques. In addition to buying votes, Lincoln sends a letter denying any knowledge of a peace delegation from Richmond, even though this is clearly a lie. Jo Ann Skousen writing in Liberty was saddened that the audience in the theatre cheered at this: “I was disheartened that they didn’t feel the same shame I felt when I saw a president of the USA  deliberately lie to get his way. But I wasn’t surprised. It’s what we expect today.”

I visited Louisiana in 1996 and got the feeling that the Civil War had not ended. Despite the efforts of Lincoln, JFK, LBJ and MLK, Louisiana is still segregated.  Seemingly-decent whites speak of blacks in terms that would cause horror in polite society in Europe or Sri Lanka.  I was shown around  a plantation house by a “docent” employed by the heritage industry to sanitise the  horrors of the Old South. Following the civil war, Louisiana was under martial law. Nevertheless, white Democrats blocked black voter-registration. In 1900 African-Americans formed  47% of Louisiana’s population – 652,013 black citizens. By 1910, there were only 730 black voters.

White Democrats had established one-party rule which they maintained long into the 20th century. White racists turned to terrorism to dissuade blacks from voting. The Tuskegee Institute has recorded 3,446 blacks were lynched between 1882 and 1968. The most prevalent alleged crime accusation was murder, followed by a list of infractions that included verbal and physical aggression, spirited business competition and independence of mind. Law-enforcement authorities sometimes participated directly or held suspects in jail until a mob performed the lynching. Lynchings became mass spectacles with a circus-like atmosphere because they were intended to emphasize majority power. Children often attended these public lynchings. A large lynching might be announced beforehand in the newspaper.

Despite Reconstruction,  the South  became a poverty-stricken backwater and whites re-established their supremacy. Historian Eric Foner argues, “What remains certain is that Reconstruction failed, and that for blacks its failure was a disaster whose magnitude cannot be obscured by the genuine accomplishments that did endure.”

Today, African-Americans  account for  just over 12% of the US population. About 50% of all prison inmates are black. In 2005, 8.1% of all black males age 25 to 29 were in prison, compared to 1.1% of white males.  Wilbert Rideau, a former inmate at Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola Prison Farm), wrote in 2010 that “slavery was commonplace in Angola with perhaps a quarter of the population in bondage”. Weak inmates were gang-raped, and traded and sold like cattle. C. Murray Henderson, one of the wardens brought in to clean up the prison, said that systemic sexual slavery was sanctioned and facilitated by the prison guards

Today, Louisiana has poverty, crime and health indicators, particularly for blacks, equivalent to  third-world nations. The average life-span of an African-American in New Orleans was nearly as low in 2003 as in North Korea. In 2003-05, the infant mortality rate (IMR) in the US as a whole for African-Americans was 13.6; the rate for White Americans was 5.7 per 1000 births. IMR is generally seen as an indicator of a nation’s level of health development and  is one of  the best predictors of state failures. Louisiana’s poverty rate is 19.2%; more than 26% of the state’s children live in poverty. The gap between rich and poor continues to widen.

America’s  civil war lasted four years and ended 148 years ago. When will the reconstruction and reconciliation process be completed? Has it begun? Is there a mechanism for presenting Louisiana’s case  to the UNHRC?

Reconciliation in Ireland Part 2

Cromwell’s Genocidal Legacy

During the negotiations towards the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, which eventually led to independence and today’s modern republican state of Ireland, Lloyd George was heard to express his exasperation at the Irish team’s  reluctance to discuss current mundane issues such as borders and policing. “They  only want to talk about Cromwell!”
Jonathan Powell in his book on the more recent Northern Ireland peace process, Great Hatred, Little Room, said that he and Tony Blair had the same problem with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness. With them it was Cromwell,  with Reverend Ian Paisley it was the Siege of Derry and the Battle of the Boyne.

Winston Churchill was not loved by the Irish. My father described him as the man who sent the Black and Tans into Ireland to shoot civilians and burn villages. Churchill described the impact of Cromwell on Anglo-Irish relations thus:
“…upon all of these Cromwell’s record was a lasting bane. By an uncompleted process of terror, by an iniquitous land settlement, by the virtual proscription of the Catholic religion, by the bloody deeds already described, he cut new gulfs between the nations and the creeds. ‘Hell or Connaught’ were the terms he thrust upon the native inhabitants, and they for their part, across three hundred years, have used as their keenest expression of hatred ‘The Curse of Cromwell on you.’ … Upon all of us there still lies ‘the curse of Cromwell’.”

History lives in the present. Cromwell was a hard act to forgive and forget.

Plantations and Genocide

In October 1641, after a bad harvest, Phelim O’Neill launched a rebellion, hoping to rectify grievances of Irish Catholic landowners. Once the rebellion was underway, the resentment of the native Irish in Ulster boiled over into indiscriminate attacks on the settler population. Recent research suggests  4,000 settlers were killed directly and up to 12,000 may have perished from disease or privation after being expelled from their homes. Ulster was worst hit. The atrocities committed by both sides further poisoned the relationship between the settler and native communities and arguably the wounds still fester. Does this remind anyone of Palestine?

Cromwell with the New Model Army by 1652 had effectively re-conquered Ireland. Cromwell held all Irish Catholics responsible for the rebellion of 1641. The Irish Catholic land-owning class was utterly destroyed and Cromwell achieved the logical conclusion of the plantation process. Over 12,000 New Model Army veterans were given Irish land instead of wages. They were required to keep their weapons to act as a reserve militia in case of future rebellions.

Cromwell has his defenders among modern historians but a recent book, God’s Executioner by Mícheál Ó Siochrú, is a forceful restatement of the prosecution case. The 1649-53 campaign lingers in the Irish psyche for the  huge death toll (possibly 40% of the population).There was  wholesale burning of crops, forced population movement and slaughter of civilians. The post-war Cromwellian settlement of Ireland has been characterized as “genocidal”.

The fifty years from 1641 to 1691 saw two catastrophic periods of civil war in Ireland  which killed hundreds of thousands of people and left others in permanent exile. Some Irish were sent to the West indies as slaves. The first recorded sale of Irish slaves was to a settlement along the Amazon in South America in 1612 but early arrangements were probably unofficial although encouraged by James I. In 1637, a census showed that 69% of the inhabitants of Montserrat in the West Indies were Irish slaves. The Irish had a tendency to die in the heat, and were not as well suited to the work as African slaves, but African slaves had to be bought. Irish slaves could be kidnapped. After the 1641 rebellion, an estimated 300,000 were sold as slaves. In the 1650′s, 100,000 Irish Catholic children were taken from their parents and sold as slaves, many to Virginia and New England. From 1651 to 1660 there were more Irish slaves in America than the entire non-slave population of the colonies.

The wars, which pitted Irish Catholics against British forces and Protestant settlers, ended in the almost complete dispossession of the Catholic landed elite. The Plantations had a profound impact on Ireland in several ways. The native ruling classes were destroyed and replaced by the Protestant Ascendancy.

Sir William Petty

William Petty (1623-87) – mathematician, mechanic, physician, cartographer and statistician – devised a public-private partnership for “fusing science and policy”. Petty is best known through his connection with the Cromwellian settlement of Ireland. Arriving in Ireland in 1652 as physician-general to the army, he set about making himself useful by  surveying the boundaries of holdings and assessing relative values. This became known as the Down Survey, which commodified Irish land. It standardised the measure of estates, in size and in value, and, as, Petty himself was a major holder of these debentures, he became very rich. When he arrived in Ireland, he had maybe £500 in assets, but  he came to own 50,000 acres in County Kerry alone. John Aubrey estimated Petty’s  rental income at its height at £18,000 a year – perhaps £27 million in today’s money.

Petty anticipated Henry Ford’s methods (Ford’s father was from County Cork) of division of labour and economies of scale. He divided complicated tasks into bits that could be handled by men “not of the nimblest witts”, that is, by the soldiers themselves, who were also tough enough to deal with angry landowners and “with the severall rude persons in the country, from whome they might expect to be often crossed and opposed”.

One way of preventing Ireland from being a haven for terrorists was to transform it  by social engineering into a peaceful and productive land. Ireland could be seen as a laboratory in  which a new, rational and virtuous society might be developed. Petty wrote: “Some furious Spirits have wished, that the Irish would rebel again, that they might be put to the Sword.” He had some scruples: “I declare, that motion to be not only impious and inhumane, but withal frivolous and pernicious even to them who have rashly wish’d for those occasions.”

Eugenics and Ethnic Cleansing

Petty explored the idea of breeding the “meer Irish”  out of existence by deporting 10,000 Irishwomen of marriageable age to England every year and replacing  them with a like number of Englishwomen?  “The whole Work of natural Transmutation and Union would in four or five years be accomplished.” The Englishwomen would run Irish households on much more civilised lines: “The Language of the Children shall be English, and the whole Oeconomy of the Family English, viz. Diet, Apparel, &c., and the Transmutation will be very easy and quick”.

Cromwell’s genocidal campaign had been financed through promises of confiscated Irish land. Rebels were executed and others were sent as slaves to the West Indies. Irish soldiers were given the opportunity of going abroad to fight in foreign armies and became known as the Wild Geese.

All land east of the River Shannon was claimed by the Crown. About 8,400,000 acres were reassigned from Catholic to Protestant owners. The former Irish owners could either accept transportation to poorer land reserved for them in Connaught or be tenants of the new Protestant owners. Catholic ownership plummeted from 60%  of the land before the Rebellion to less than 10%  after 1652. It was a great experiment in the movement of populations and transference of social power.

There has been speculation  that Irish travellers  were descended from ancestors who were made homeless by Cromwell.

Petty may have provided some useful ideas to Hitler and Mengele.. While I deplore the activities of conflict junkies who are only happy when the fires of hatred are constantly stoked, one cannot understand contemporary Ireland without knowing where the divisions in Irish society originated.

Reconciliation in Ireland Part 1

Ireland’s Revenge on the Tudors.

I have been watching on DVD the Showtime TV series The Tudors. It strikes me as ironic that the series was filmed in Ireland and has provided gainful employment to innumerable Irish actors (including my Facebook friend Nick Dunning, wonderfully shifty as Thomas Boleyn).  Ironic because many of the troubles Ireland has suffered over the centuries resulted from the policies and actions of Henry VIII (played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers – Sean O’Keefe from County Cork- who first came to fame as the man who shot Michael Collins in Neil Jordan’s film).

Patriotic Irishmen, my father included, like to talk about 800 years of British oppression (see the responses to my essay on Groundviews: http://groundviews.org/2012/03/17/martyrology-martyrdom-rebellion-terrorism/). True, Strongbow (Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, Lord of Leinster, Justiciar of Ireland)  invaded Ireland in 1170, but it was not until the Tudors that the real oppression began. Strongbow is described as Cambro-Norman,  a term used for Norman knights who settled in southern Wales after the Norman conquest of England in 1066.

War on Terrorism?

The Normans were not generally too much of a bother to the native Irish and actually helped bring a measure of efficiency to agriculture, commerce and the law. To a great extent the Normans “went native”. Some adopted the Irish language and customs, and intermarried, and the Irish themselves also became “Normanised”. Many Irish people today bear Norman-derived surnames such as Fitzgerald, Burke, Roche and Power. There are many Irish D’Arcy’s, De Laceys and De Burghs. There are several distinct types of Irish face. One of them- thin lips, sharp nose- is distinctively Norman.

Many of Ireland’s problems came from Wales. The  Welshman Henry VII founded the Tudor dynasty in 1485 after killing the reigning King Richard III. In 1536, Henry VIII deposed the Fitzgerald dynasty of Kildare as Lords Deputies of Ireland. The Fitzgeralds had been, in effect, rulers of Ireland since the 15th century but had become a security threat to the Johnny-Come-Lately Tudor dynasty by inviting Burgundian troops into Dublin and crowning  the Yorkist pretender, Lambert Simnel as “King of England” in 1497. In 1536, Silken Thomas Fitzgerald rebelled  against Henry VIII. The rebellion was put down and Henry tried to bring all Ireland under his control to prevent it being used as a base for  a Catholic invasion of England.

Spenser’s Final Solution

Edmund Spenser, considered by many the first English poet of note after Chaucer, could also be regarded as the  Radovan Karadzic of his day. Spenser  wrote most of his masterpiece, The Faery Queene, on his 3,000 acre estate at Kilcolman Castle in County Cork. County Cork is in the province of Munster. He also wrote propaganda advocating genocide. The Munster Plantation of the 1580s was the first mass plantation in Ireland. It was a punishment for the Desmond rebellions.  The Desmond dynasty was annihilated and their estates were confiscated.

In his View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), Spenser outlined his programme for civilizing the wild Gaels. Declan Kiberd has written: “The sheer ferocity of Spenser’s writings on the Irish resistance – a ferocity quite at odds with the gentle charm of his poetry-  can only be explained  as arising from a radical ambivalence.   He wished to convert the Irish to civil ways, but in order to do that found that it might be necessary to exterminate many of them”. The tract was definitely written to influence policy and seriously argued that starvation was the best way to bring the Irish under control. The pamphlet argued that Ireland would never be totally “pacified” (remember the “pacification villages” in Vietnam?)  by the English until its indigenous language and customs had been destroyed, if necessary by violence.

Spenser’s View is seen today as genocidal – a precursor of fellow-poet Radovan Karadzic, perhaps? Spenser did express some praise for the Gaelic poetic tradition, but also used much tendentious and bogus analysis to demonstrate that the Irish were descended from barbarian stock. He fully understood the consequences of what he was advocating and described in graphic detail the effects on a starving Irish population who “consume themselves and devour one another”.

Spenser was a beneficiary of the theft of land from the native Irish. Spenser communicated with his neighbor and fellow poet Sir Walter Raleigh, who had commandeered 40,000 prime Irish acres for himself at Youghal.

Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork, may have been an ancestor of the writer Richard Boyle, who has long been resident in Sri Lanka. Both were born in Canterbury. The Earl of Cork claimed most of the County and Munster as his own.

 

Plantations

English “Undertakers” were wealthy colonists who undertook to import tenants from England, Scotland  and Wales to work their new lands. The plan was for land to be confiscated and redistributed to create concentrations of British settlers around new towns and garrisons. The new landowners were explicitly banned from taking Irish tenants. The Planters were also barred from selling their lands to any Irishman.

The remaining Irish landowners were to be granted one quarter of the land in Ulster and the ordinary Irish population was relocated to live near garrisons and Protestant churches. Up to 80,000 English and Scots Protestants had been settled in the previously Catholic north of Ireland by 1641. The Reformation did not “take” in Ireland. This was because brutal methods were used to pacify the country and exploit its resources, which heightened resentment of English rule.

Settlers with a British and Protestant identity, would form the ruling class of future British administrations in Ireland. Penal laws discriminated against Catholics, who were barred from public office and from serving in the army. Voting for  Parliament was rigged so the Protestants would always have the majority.

There is a familiar imperial pattern here of colonisation, land theft, divide and rule, religious and racial discrimination, and brutality leading to conflict. During the years of the Provisional IRA terrorist campaign the British from a superior height would say : ”Why is it these people can’t just get on with each other?” To Irish people, it is not an Irish problem. Ireland suffered from an English (or possibly Welsh) problem.

Reconciliation in Burma

What’s in a name?

 
I generally like to call this South East Asian nation “Burma” rather than “Myanmar”. In doing so, I am in line with the US State Department: “Although the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) changed the name of the country to ‘Myanmar,’ the democratically elected but not convened Parliament of 1990 does not recognize the name change, and the democratic opposition maintains use of the name ‘Burma.’ Due to consistent, unyielding support for the democratically elected leaders, the U.S. Government likewise uses ‘Burma’.”

 
Burmese lessons for Sri Lanka?

 
That “State Peace and Development Council “ is the name the dictatorship gives itself. They have been giving a show recently of relaxing their grip somewhat. On July 30,  US Under Secretary of State Robert Hormats told the Washington International Trade Association: “My baseline scenario is they will continue to move in the direction of reform”.

 

 

President Thein Sein

The “new” government, led by President Thein Sein, a former military general, has started overhauling the country’s economy, easing media censorship, legalizing trade unions and protests and freeing political prisoners. The most prominent of those, Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese opposition leader, has been allowed to travel outside the country.

I have seen a  few bizarre  comments in the Sri Lankan media suggesting that the Sri Lankan should look to Burma for lessons on how to conduct itself. These commentators seem determined  to think the worst of Sri Lanka if they think the nation consistently  placed at number 190 in the human rights league of shame could be an exemplar to anyone.

 
“There has been one admirable quality among many Burmese leaders in the past and present, unlike in Sri Lanka. They were modest enough to admit failures. Ne Win himself declared that ‘Burmese socialism’ was a failure and stepped down in 1988. That led to continuous social upheavals asking for democracy.”

 

 

General Ne Win

So says Laksiri Fernando,  author of Human Rights, Politics and States: Burma, Cambodia and Sri Lanka writing in the Asian Tribune. Fernando can even see the bright side of  the ethnic conflicts in Burma: “There are thousands and thousands of internally displaced people in the country due to the ethnic conflict. No one calls the ethnic conflict a myth like in Sri Lanka!” Another great thing was, according to Fernando, that “no insurgency evolved into ruthless terrorism like in Sri Lanka”.

 

 

Colonial background

 
British rule in Burma lasted from 1824 to 1948, from the Anglo-Burmese Wars through the creation of Burma as a province of  British India. The First Anglo-Burmese War arose from friction between Arakan in western Burma and British-held Chittagong to the north. The British navy took Rangoon without a fight in 1824 but the war itself had cost 15,000 European and Indian troops and cost the equivalent of 48 billion US dollars of today. This caused a severe economic crisis for British India. In 1852, the Second Anglo-Burmese War was provoked by the British who wanted the teak forests in Lower Burma as well as a port between Calcutta and Singapore.

 

The Third Anglo-Burmese War in 1885 was because of the British desire to get their hands on the resources of the north. The British government justified their actions by claiming that the last independent king of Myanmar, Thibaw, was a tyrant and that he was conspiring to give France more influence in the country. After 25 years of peace fighting started again and lasted until the British occupied the whole of Lower Burma.

 

 

King Thibaw

The Third Anglo-Burmese War lasted less than two weeks during November 1885. British troops entered Mandalay on 28 November 1885 and Burma was incorporated into the British empire on 1 January 1886. The new colony of Upper Burma was attached to the Burma Province on 26 February 1886. Rangoon, having been the capital of British Lower Burma, became the capital of the province.

 
The British tied  Burmese economy to  global market forces and forced Burma to  become a part of the colonial export economy. Suddenly a large amount of Burmese resources were being exported for Britain’s benefit, thereby extracring the resources needed by the Burmese to continue living their lives as they had before colonisation. Vast tracts of land were converted  for cultivation of rice for export. Burmese farmers were forced to borrow money from Indian moneylenders at high interest rates prepare the new land for cultivation. This often led to the eviction of indigenous farmers and most jobs went to indentured Indian labourers.

 
An account by a British official describing the conditions of the Burmese people’s livelihoods in 1941 describes the Burmese hardships as they must quickly adapt to foreign trade:

 
“The peasant had grown factually poorer and unemployment had increased…. The collapse of the Burmese social system led to a decay of the social conscience which, in the circumstances of poverty and unemployment caused a great increase in crime.”

 
Burmese were excluded from the civil service and the military which were staffed by Indians, Anglo-Burmese and minority groups such as the Karens. The Burmese resented both the British and the Indian migrants, and staged guerrilla warfare, often led by former Burmese army officers, against the British army of occupation.

 
The British rulers imposed a separation of church and state and exiled King Thibaw. This was a way of imposing direct control. The monarchy had supported the sangha and the Buddhist monks were dependent on the monarchy and explained the monarchy to the public. The imperial power introduced a secular education system and encouraged Christian missionaries to found schools Buddhism and traditional Burmese culture were discouraged as part of a plan to deprive the  Burmese people of a cultural unity separate from the British.

 

 

Resistance continued in northern Burma until 1890, with the British systematically destroying villages. Grass-roots control was exercised by burning villages and uprooting established families regarded as disloyal. Dissent was suppressed by  mass executions.

 
Independence

 
An independence movement emerged in the early 20th century, initially led by monks and students. A nationalist movement began to take shape in the form of Young Men’s Buddhist Associations (YMBA). Between 1900 and 1911 the “Irish Buddhist” U Dhammaloka  (a hobo variously known as Laurence Carroll, Laurence O’Rourke and William Colvin or “Captain Daylight”, who was probably born in Dublin in 1850) publicly challenged Christianity and imperial power, leading to two trials for sedition.

 

 

U Dhammaloka

By the 1930s a new radical movement known as the Thakin was formed. Its leading figures included Aung San, U Nu and Ne Win. They began to look to neighbouring powers to help break the yoke of British rule. One student, Ko Aung Kyaw, was beaten to death by British colonial police in the third Rangoon University student boycott in December 1938. Students had been supporting striking oil workers. In Mandalay,  police shot into a crowd of protesters led by Buddhist monks, killing 17 people.

 

 

Aung San

Aung San, Aung San Suu Kyi’s father, sought support for the Burmese independence struggle from Japan. Japan invaded Burma in 1942 but never succeeded in fully conquering the whole country. On 1 August 1943, the Japanese declared Burma to be an independent nation. Aung San was appointed War Minister. He became disillusioned with the Japanese. One of his followers told General Slim:  ‘If the British sucked our blood, the Japanese ground our bones!’ When the British defeated the Japanese Aung San was offered the rank of Deputy Inspector General of the Burma Army, but he declined and became the civilian political leader and the military leader of the People’s Volunteer Organisation (PVO).

 

He was assassinated on 19 July 1947 Former prime minister U Saw was tried and hanged. A number of middle-ranking British army officers were also were tried and imprisoned. There were rumours of higher-level British involvement, and/or involvement by Ne Win Aung San’s long-term rival.

 

U Saw with Lord Halifax

Dictatorship

For most of its existence as an independent nation, Burma has been a military dictatorship. There were sporadic protests against military rule during the Ne Win years and these were almost always violently suppressed. In 1974, the military violently suppressed anti-government protests at the funeral of U Thant, Burmese UN General Secretary. Student protests in 1975, 1976 and 1977 were quickly suppressed by overwhelming force.

 

 

General   Saw Maung

In 1988, unrest over economic mismanagement and political oppression led to  pro-democracy demonstrations throughout the country. Security forces killed thousands of demonstrators.  General   Saw Maung staged a coup and established SLORC – the State Law and Order Restoration council. In May 1990, the government held free elections for the first time in almost 30 years and the NLD – National League for Democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi’s party won 80% of the seats. SLORC  continued to rule until 1997, and then ruled as the SPDC until March 2011.

 
Ethnic conflict

 
Pace Mr Fernando,  analyst Martin Smith believes “Burma has been the scene of some of the most-sustained and diverse ethnic insurgencies in the contemporary world… conflict resolution––with integrated support from the international community––remains a primary need if Burma and its peoples are to achieve peace, democracy, and a stable nation-state.” There are 135 officially recognised ethnic groups in Burma. Martin Smith writes: “In the deep mountains and forests of the borderland periphery, over 20 armed opposition groups controlled, under their own administrations, vast swathes of territory and continued to reflect an often changing alignment of different political or nationality causes.”

 
The Thailand Burma Border Consortium’s (TBBC) annual report on conditions in South East  Burma “found that more people had been forcibly displaced from their homes during the past year than any other since data was first collected in 2002.” Jack Dunford, the TBBC’s Executive Director, said: “A determined and sustained effort to resolve ethnic conflict in Burma is essential to avoid another generation of violence and abuse.” In recent years the TBBC’s and its partner agencies have documented “the destruction, forced relocation or abandonment of more than 3,700 civilian settlements in South East Burma since 1996.” The TBBC statement estimated that during the past year at least 112,000 people were forced to abandon their homes. “While some fled into Thailand as part of an ongoing flow of new refugee arrivals and others returned to former villages or resettled elsewhere in Burma, over 450,000 people currently remain internally displaced in the south eastern region.”

 

Mr Dunford said that while democratic reforms by the “new” government are both vital and welcomed but conflict has increased in ethnic areas.

 
Muslims

 
Even though some wish to be optimistic about Burma, oppression of minorities hits the headlines even today. Burma has a  substantial Muslim population, known as  Rohingyas, of 800,000. Rohingyas have been subjected to persecution for decades. According to Amnesty International, 200,000 of them fled to Bangladesh in 1978 to escape a brutal military operation. Another  250,000 went into exile in 1991-92. The refugees complained of rape, persecution and forced labour by the military. Another 100,000 fled to Thailand, but were forced to leave for camps along the border. Although the Rohingyas have lived in Burma since the eight century they are regarded as illegal immigrants with no rights. A 56-page report released Wednesday by Human rights Watch  group called for strong international reaction to “atrocities” committed during last month’s bloody unrest between Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingyas, which left 78 people dead and about 100,000 homeless.

 
Recently a foreign journalist asked Aung Sang Suu Kyi whether she regarded Rohingyas as citizens of Burma. “I do not know. We have to be very clear about what the laws of citizenship are and who are entitled to them.” This can be translated as “I won’t get any votes by defending a minority group”.

 
US involvement

 

The US had  accepted Burma as one of the original beneficiaries of its Generalized System of Preference (GSP) program in 1976. It also granted Burma Most Favored Nation (MFN, now referred to as Normal Trade Relations, or NTR) status, and supported the provision of developmental assistance by international financial institutions.

 

There were also close military to military relations (including a major International Military Education and Training [IMET] programme) until 1988. The implementing of sanctions on Burma did not begin until after the Tatmadaw (Burmese military) brutally suppressed a peaceful, popular protest that has become known as the 8888 Uprising. Starting in the fall of 1987, popular protests against the military government sprang up throughout Burma, reaching a peak in August 1988.

 

Washington recently lifted some  financial and investment sanctions in response to nascent democratic reforms but has retained the ban on imports — a restriction that a US Senate committee this month said should be extended by three years.

 

Garment industry

 
Prior to the passage of Customs and Trade Act of 1990, the Bush pére Administration had suspended Burma’s eligibility for the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) program on April 13, 1989. President Bush also designated Burma as a drug-producing and/or drug-trafficking country under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 on February 28, 1990, which required the United States to oppose loans to Burma by international financial institutions.

 

Today, optimists on Burma have criticised sanctions as stifling key job-creating areas of the economy such as the garment industry rather than hurting the interests of the corrupt elite it targets. The
International Crisis Group(ICG)  think-tank is well-known to Sri Lankans. Although it has called for sanctions on Sri Lanka it opposes them on the far worse regime in Burma. It says Myanmar’s reform process had challenged “the dominance” of crony businessmen, who flourished under the disbanded junta, and nudged the economy towards greater openness at the expense of some key hardliners.

 

ICG warned that renewing the US import embargo, due to lapse this year, “could have a serious impact on Myanmar’s economic recovery”. ICG believes the  ban is skewing the nation’s economy towards “potentially problematic” extractive industries at the expense of sectors that employ large numbers of ordinary people.

 

Resources

 
Burma is cursed by being a resource-rich country. Burma’s GDP stands at $42.953 billion and grows at an average rate of  only 2.9% ICG believes that current sanctions will skew the economy towards extractive industries such as oil, gas and gem mining which have long been linked with corruption and also raise fears over environmental damage.

 

Human rights

 
The UN and several other organizations have reported consistent and systematic  human rights violations in Burma including child labour and human trafficking. After Hurricane Nargis devastated the country international NGOs feared that the reconstruction effort would depend on forced labour – be it from children or migrant adult workers. The Tatmadaw  routinely forces civilians to work on state infrastructure projects, such as the building of roads, bridges, military bases or even towns.

 

When friends have enthused about the joys of Burma as a tourist destination I have responded that I could  not be comfortable in a hotel that had been built by slaves. A Boycott Burma campaign stated : “As a tourist to Burma you will travel on roads and railroads, see temples and palaces and stay in hotels built or rebuilt since 1988, which will definitely contain the dead bodies of the slave labourers who made them for you… I never met anyone going to Burma since 1988 to help the people there. Only selfish, ignorant people on holiday who want to see for themselves. See what? Burmese used as human landmine detectors? Burmese slave labour camps? Burmese people dead in piles in the no man’s land? If you go to Burma, you pay to murder the people you visit.”
The army has  used  villagers as human minesweepers to clear the way for the safe passage of soldiers. Convicts are used as forced labour. It is estimated that as many as 20 percent of prisoners sentenced to “prison with hard labour” die as a consequence of the conditions of their detention. It has been reported that at least 91 labour camps operate in areas across the country .

 

Human Rights Watch (HRW) estimated that there may be more than 70,000 child soldiers in the SPDC Army. The children are often kidnapped without their parents’ knowledge while on their way home from school. They are then brutalised and physically abused during their induction and basic training before being shipped off to fight in the country’s ethnic states. “Child soldiers are sometimes forced to participate in human rights abuses, such as burning villages and using civilians for forced labour,” said HRW. “Those who attempt to escape or desert are beaten, forcibly re-recruited or imprisoned.”

 

Back in 2009, The Independent reported that Burmese soldiers, who provide security for the Yadana oil pipeline on behalf of the French company, Total, are forcing thousands of people to work portering, carrying wood and repairing roads in the pipeline area. They have also been forced to build police stations and barracks.
Reconciliation

 

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? With poverty, inequality and racism,  there will always be conflict.
In a media statement the TBBC said: “While government figures estimate that a quarter of the nation live in poverty, the survey found that almost two thirds of households in rural areas of the South East are unable to meet their basic needs.” The TBBC statement said poverty severe in the “conflict-affected areas of northern Kayin State and eastern Bago Region.”

 

Jack Dunford said: “As prospects for the voluntary return of refugees and internally displaced persons are directly linked to national reconciliation, the urgency of finding a solution to conflict in Burma has never been greater.”

Reconciliation in Bosnia

Yugonostalgia

 

I am old enough to recall when Yugoslavia was held up by leftists in the west as a model for how a society and economy could  be run for the benefit of citizens rather than corporations. Yugoslavia experimented  with a type of independent socialism that allowed  workers in state-run enterprises to participate in management. I purchased  a volume Penguin published of  learned essays on worker self-management (sometimes called workers’ control or autogestion) in which socialist intellectuals enthused about Yugoslavia. Autogestion, they believed, was the answer to labour relation problems in the west.

Tito could be seen as a benevolent dictator because he had stood up to Stalin. “Stop sending people to kill me. We’ve already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle (…) If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow, and I won’t have to send a second.” His internal policies successfully maintained the peaceful coexistence of the nations of the Yugoslav federation and  he gained international attention as the chief leader of the Non-Aligned Movement. On 1 January 1967, Yugoslavia was the first communist country to open its borders to all foreign visitors and abolish visa requirements. Croatia became a popular holiday destination and its wine appeared on British supermarket shelves.
Tito’s good reputation survived  the criticisms of dissident Milovan Djilas, who had been regarded as Tito’s natural successor. Slobodan Markovic, a political scientist, derided a wave of Yugonostalgia: “People have forgotten that Tito was a dictator. They remember there was peace and stability, and they forget the violation of human rights. Yugoslavia lived well because it was the only communist country that received enormous US aid and then loans.”

One hundred and twenty-eight countries sent political delegations to Tito’s funeral; those present included the USSR’s Brezhnev, Jimmy Carter’s mother, James Callaghan, Yasser Arafat, Colonel Gaddafi, the Duke of Edinburgh, Nicolae Ceausescu, Erich Honecker. There were four kings, 31 presidents, six princes, 22 prime ministers, 47 foreign ministers. Only five countries, including Pinochet’s Chile and apartheid-era South Africa, stayed away.

Entropy

After Tito’s death in 1980, the New York Times wrote: ”Tito sought to improve life. … Yugoslavia gradually became a bright spot amid the general greyness of Eastern Europe”.  Tensions between the Yugoslav republics soon emerged and in 1991 the country collapsed into a mayhem of  inter-communal strife and horror. Djilas wrote: “Our system was built only for Tito to manage. Now that Tito is gone and our economic situation becomes critical, there will be a natural tendency for greater centralization of power. But this centralization will not succeed because it will run up against the ethnic-political power bases in the republics. This is not classical nationalism but a more dangerous, bureaucratic nationalism built on economic self-interest. This is how the Yugoslav system will begin to collapse.”

 

 
The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina was particularly complex and horrific because there were so many parties involved. It was principally a territorial conflict, initially between Serb forces and the national army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was mainly composed of Muslim Bosniaks, and Croatian forces. The population of the  multi-ethnic, multi-faith  Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was 44% Muslim Bosniaks, 31% Orthodox Serbs, 17% Catholic Croats. Serbs set up their own enclave within Bosnia, Republika Srpska, whose army had some 80,000 personnel during the war and  committed war crimes and genocide against Bosnia Muslims and Croats.

Sarajevo and Srebrenica

There is no space here to describe the full complexity and horror of the Bosnian war. Let Sarajevo and Srebrenica stand as specimens. The siege of Sarajevo was the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare, three times longer than the Siege of Stalingrad. There was an average of 329 shell impacts per day during the course of the siege, with a maximum of 3,777 on 22 July 1993. It is estimated that nearly 12,000 people were killed or went missing in the city, including over 1,500 children. An additional 56,000 people were wounded, including nearly 15,000 children. Snipers killed civilians queuing for water or trying to buy food in the market. Bosniak  homes were ransacked, males taken to concentration camps, women repeatedly raped. UNICEF reported that, at least 40% children in the city had been directly shot at by snipers; 51% had seen someone killed; 39% had seen one or more family members killed; 19% had witnessed a massacre; 48% had their home occupied by someone else; 73% had their home attacked or shelled; and 89% had lived in underground shelters. The Bosnian Government reported a soaring suicide rate by Sarajevans, a near doubling of abortions and a 50% drop in births since the siege began.

In July 1995, at Srebrenica, a  “safe area” under UN protection, 8,000 Muslim men and boys were rounded up by Serb forces under Ratko Mladić  and massacred.

The genocidal plan was orchestrated by poet-politician Radovan Karadžić, President of Republika Srpska.

Karadžić was accused of directing Bosnian Serb forces to “create an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival of life” in the UN safe area. In addition, he is accused by the ICTY of ordering that UN  personnel be taken hostage in May–June 1995.The Bosniak victims included boys aged under 15, men over the age of 65, women, and reportedly even several babies.

UN failings – to intervene or not to intervene?

Dutch UN soldiers were criticised for failing to protect the Bosniak refugees in the “safe area”. Lieutenant-Colonel Thom Karremans was filmed drinking a toast with  Mladić . Zumra Šehomerovic reported mass rapes. The rapes often took place under the eyes of others and sometimes even under the eyes of the children of the mother. A Dutch soldier stood by and he simply looked around with a  Walkman on his head. He did not react at all to what was happening. It did not happen just before my eyes, for I saw that personally, but also before the eyes of us all. The Dutch soldiers walked around everywhere. It is impossible that they did not see it.”

 
In 2005, in a message on  the tenth anniversary commemoration of the genocide, Kofi Annan  noted that, while blame lay first and foremost with those who planned and carried out the massacre and those who assisted and harboured them, great nations had failed to respond adequately.  Srebrenica would haunt the UN forever.  In 2004, the International Criminal court ruled that the massacre constituted genocide, a crime under international law.

Jasmin Mujanović argues that persistent fallacies have informed the international community’s attempts to “deal” with Bosnia since (at least) 1991-92. He writes that the war was not “the result of the unbridled and millennial ethnic hatreds of its peoples, but rather the engineered and orchestrated machinations of an unaccountable political elite seeking to secure its political and economic survival in a period of immense social crisis”… Significant elements of the international community advocated a foreign policy based on preserving a vacuous conception of ‘stability’ and ‘unity’ rather than a principled insistence on democratization and human rights. …the international community had sent strong signals to the country’s leadership that an increased role by the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) would be a welcome step towards checking some of their growing concerns about the stability of political authority in the country in the post-Tito period.”

Death Toll

There are large discrepancies between estimates of the total number of casualties in the Bosnian war, ranging from 25,000 to 329,000. According to Prof. Steven L. Burg and Prof. Paul S. Shoup: “The figure of 200,000 (or more) dead, injured, and missing was frequently cited in media reports on the war in Bosnia as late as 1994. The October 1995 bulletin of the Bosnian Institute for Public Health of the Republic Committee for Health and Social Welfare gave the numbers as 146,340 killed, and 174,914 wounded on the territory under the control of the Bosnian army. Mustafa Imamovic gave a figure of 144,248 perished (including those who died from hunger or exposure), mainly Muslims. The Red Cross and the UNHCR have not, to the best of our knowledge, produced data on the number of persons killed and injured in the course of the war. A November 1995 unclassified CIA memorandum estimated 156,500 civilian deaths in the country (all but 10,000 of them in Muslim- or Croat-held territories), not including the 8,000 to 10,000 then still missing from Srebrenica and Zepa enclaves. This figure for civilian deaths far exceeded the estimate in the same report of 81,500 troops killed (45,000 Bosnian government; 6,500 Bosnian Croat; and 30,000 Bosnian Serb).”

Peace?

There were several major massacres during 1995 and NATO made many airstrikes against Bosnian Serb positions supported by UNPROFOR rapid reaction force artillery attacks. On 14 September 1995, the NATO air strikes were suspended to allow the implementation of an agreement with Bosnian Serbs for the withdrawal of heavy weapons from around Sarajevo. On 26 September 1995, an agreement of further basic principles for a peace accord was reached in New York. A 60-day ceasefire came into effect on 12 October, and on 1 November peace talks began in Dayton, Ohio. The war ended with the Dayton Peace Agreement signed on 21 November 1995.

The Dayton Accord was described as a “construction of necessity” the immediate purpose of which  was to freeze the military confrontation, and prevent it  from resuming. There is no space here to go into the intricate juggling to swap territories from one group to another in order to establish the new nation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH). Many scholars have deemed Dayton an  impressive example of conflict resolution which has turned Bosnia from a basket-case to a potential EU member.

Critics have, however, had problems with the fact  international , unaccountable to BiH’s citizens, to shape the agenda of post-war transition, and decide  punishment for  local political actors. Another perceived flaw is  each ethnic group was discontented with the results. Bosniaks were upset that  human rights issues were ignored  and that Serbian entities were given recognition. Edin Šarčević, of the Bosnian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the current legal structure of the agreement does not abide by the basic principles of international law making the Bosnian territorial and political situation continually unstable and fractious since its implementation.

Truth and Reconciliation

Retributive justice is impossible to apply in a context like Bosnia where so many were involved in the conflict. There are not enough resources to capture and try everyone who committed war crimes. Widespread arrests would reignite conflict. In January 2005, Hajra Catic, of the Mothers of Srebrenica organization, “lost faith” in ICTY’s ability to dispense justice after they sentenced Dragan Jokic, a man she believed was responsible for 3,000 deaths, to only nine years in prison.

Eileen Babbitt wrote about  UN efforts to reintegrate refugees: “they were coming back to communities where they were really, really unwanted. Most of them were coming back to places where they were a majority population and now post-war they are the minority, so another group has literally taken over and moved into their homes, and many of those people are also displaced, traumatized, etc. and they’re not about to simply give up everything and welcome the returning refugees with open arms.”

Reconciliation is hampered by a refusal to face up to the truth because each group has its own narrative. Schools are  strictly segregated and  children learn three different versions of the  war. After many failed attempts, there has still not been a successful truth commission.

On 6 December 2004, Serbian president Boris Tadić made an apology to all those who suffered crimes committed in the name of the Serb people. Croatia’s president Ivo Josipović apologized in April 2010 for his country’s role in the Bosnian War. On 31 March 2010, the Serbian parliament adopted a declaration “condemning in strongest terms the crime committed in July 1995 against Bosniak population of Srebrenica” and apologizing to the families of the victims.

Europe

In Bosnia, 88% support the country’s bid for EU membership. Identification with Europe as a supranational community can in Bosnia and Herzegovina become a way to overcome ethnic differences. Poll results show that support for EU membership is strongest in the Muslim community, with 97% in favour, while 85%  of Bosnian Croats support it and 78% of Bosnian Serbs. The EU-initiated processes of institutional engineering and systemic inclusion of minority groups and non-nationalists into policy-making processes in Bosnia and Herzegovina signals an important and historic shift from an ethnocentric citizenship model towards a democratic and inclusive citizenship regime.

Bosnia today

On 25 July 2012 Ban Ki-moon addressed the BiH parliament and noted the progress achieved by Bosnia and Herzegovina over the last two decades, including its transformation from a country which hosted UN peacekeepers to a troop contributor to UN peacekeeping operations, and from occupying the agenda of the Security Council to successfully serving on the Council. “Led by your priorities and direction, we are working together to create jobs especially for young people, extend social protection for the most vulnerable groups, end the suffering of those enduring protracted displacement, safeguard the environment, tackle discrimination and promote respect for human rights and the rule of law.”

The Council of Europe’s European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) highlighted the continued marginalization of minority groups, particularly Roma. In a joint opinion issued in June, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UK Foreign Affairs Minister William Hague expressed disappointment at the protracted institutional gridlock in Bosnia that was preventing needed reforms, including ending ethnic discrimination in politics.

Reconciliation in Cyprus

Many of the conflicts that I have described in these articles on reconciliation have not been helped by  colonisation. In 1878, Britain was granted control of Cyprus in exchange for giving military support to the Ottoman Empire against Russia. The first British High Commissioner was  Sir Garnet Joseph Wolseley. The indigenous Greeks of the island, who in the 1881 census formed 73.9% of the population, desired enosis,  to unite with Greece.

Cypriots initially believed  British rule would bring  prosperity, democracy and national liberation. However, the  British levied severe taxes to cover the compensation which they were paying to the Sultan. All powers were reserved to the High Commissioner and to London, thwarting hopes of participatory democracy for Cypriots.
The First World War ended protectorate status and Cyprus was annexed to the British Empire. Britain offered to cede Cyprus to Greece if they would fulfil treaty obligations to attack Bulgaria, but Greece declined. Britain proclaimed Cyprus a Crown colony in 1925 under an undemocratic constitution.
Under the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 the new Turkish government formally recognised Britain’s sovereignty over Cyprus. Greek Cypriots continued to demand  enosis ,which had been  achieved by  many of the Aegean and Ionian islands following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The  British opposed enosis and unrest  developed rapidly during the 1930s. There were riots in Nicosia in 1931 during which Government House was burnt down.
The Governor, Sir Richmond Palmer, took a number of suppressive measures against the  Greek population and prohibited trade unions and limited freedom of association. In spite of this more than thirty thousand Cypriots joined the British armed forces during the Second World War.

After the war, there was increasing international pressure for enosis and a delegation from Cyprus submitted a demand to London. The demand was rejected but the British proposed a more liberal constitution and a ten-year programme of social and economic development.
When international pressure did not suffice to make Britain respond, violence escalated with a campaign against the colonial power organised by EOKA (Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston). Its leader, Colonel George Grivas created and directed an effective campaign beginning in 1955. The first bombs were set off on April 1. Attacks on police stations started on June 19. The Governor proclaimed a State of Emergency on 26 November.

For the next four years EOKA attacked British targets and those Cypriots it accused of collaboration. Archbishop Makarios and other Cypriot clergy and political leaders were forced into exile. The Cyprus emergency cost the lives of 371 British servicemen, more than have died in Afghanistan.
Turkish Cypriots in 1957 responded to the demand for enosis  by calling for  taksim, partition.  Taksim became the slogan which was used by the increasingly militant Turkish Cypriots to counter the Greek cry of ‘enosis’. In 1957 Fazıl Küçük, who represented Turkish Cypriots and later became vice-president of independent Cyprus, declared during a visit to Ankara that Turkey would claim the northern half of the island.

The British were forced to take a different attitude after the Suez fiasco demonstrated that they were no longer a convincing imperial power. Britain  decided that independence was acceptable if military  bases in Cyprus could be an  alternative to Cyprus as a base. However, Governor  Sir Hugh Foot’s plan for unitary self-government alarmed the Turkish community and violence between the two communities became  a new and deadly feature of the situation.

On August 16, 1960 Cyprus gained its independence from Britain. Archbishop Makarios was elected the first president. In 1961 Cyprus became the 99th member of the UN. Independence  did not bring reconciliation. Greek Cypriots argued that the complex mechanisms introduced to protect Turkish Cypriot interests were obstacles to efficient government and tried to exclude Turkish politicians. Both sides continued the violence. Turkish Cypriot participation in the central government ceased on December 23, 1963, when all Cypriot Turks from the lowest civil servants to ministers, including the Turkish Vice-President Dr Fazıl Küçük, were out of the government. UN peacekeepers were deployed on the island in 1964, effectively recognising the Greek Cypriots as the government. UK PM Sir Alec Douglas-Home said international intervention was essential: “There would probably have been a massacre of Turkish Cypriots” which were confined in enclaves totaling little more than 3% of the island.

In July 1974, Makarios was overthrown by a coup carried out by the Cypriot National Guard which supported the military dictators who had seized power in Athens. Turkey invaded Cyprus on July 20 and  took control of 38% of the island. 200,000 Greek Cypriots fled the northern areas and  60,000 Turkish Cypriots were transferred to northern occupied areas by the UN. Since then, the southern part of the country has been under the control of the internationally recognised Cyprus government and the northern part occupied under a Turkish administration and the Turkish army. Turkey relocated 40,000 Turkish civilians to the occupied part of the island through coercive measures, meaning that now only 45% of the Turkish population were actually born on Cyprus.

Many have accused Britain of its customary divide and rule tactics. Nicos Koshis, a former justice minister, said: “It is my feeling they wanted to have fighting between the two sides. They didn’t want us to get together. If the communities come together maybe in the future we say no bases in Cyprus.” Martin Packard, a naval intelligence officer, told Jolyon Jenkins of the BBC that in 1964 he had to take US acting secretary of state George Ball, around the island. Arriving back in Nicosia, says Packard, “Ball patted me on the back, as though I were sadly deluded and he said: That was a fantastic show son, but you’ve got it all wrong, hasn’t anyone told you that our plan here is for partition?”
Historians such as Brendan O’Malley, Ian Craig, Lawrence Stern and  William Mallinson have argued that the U.S. had a continuous, decade-long plan to partition Cyprus through external military intervention and that this plan was based on the strategic value of Cyprus as a military base and source of intelligence. Caroline Wenzke and Dan Lindley  disagree: “While the U.S.’s rationale was not always commendable or favourable to the Cypriot people and at times the State Department’s
decisions may merit criticism, the U.S. did not orchestrate a decade-long conspiracy to protect its own interests on the island.”

When Cyprus applied  to join the EU in May 2004, members of both communities (and citizens of EU) have been able to cross the buffer zone. A UN-sponsored referendum on reunification was held on 21 April 2004. Turkish Cypriots voted to accept the UN plan as stated in the referendum, but Greek Cypriots rejected it by a large majority.

The first elections to take place after Cyprus’s accession to the EU and the failed referendum, were in 2008. Dimitris Christofias of the communist party became president and  started talks with on the reunification of Cyprus as a bizonal federal state. His hopes for Greek Cypriot approval of such a plan were thwarted  by the nationalists’ victory in the 2009 parliamentary elections. Turkey’s own bid for EU membership has constantly been thwarted and they may now have given up. EU membership was a strong factor in reconciliation for the island of Ireland but that avenue seems to have closed for Cyprus.
Although Northern Cyprus has been a de jure  member of the EU since 2004, EU law is “suspended” there. Cyprus currently holds the EU presidency for the first time. President Christofias has stressed that the Cyprus Presidency will be a European Presidency, that it would only promote the EU’s interests as a whole, working as an honest broker. Cyprus is the fifth state to ask for a EU bailout. Standard and Poors estimate 15 billion euro will be needed. There is growing fear that the main victim of the Cyprus EU Presidency will be the ongoing re-unification talks.
On July 19 2012, Christofias welcomed an agreement which will continue the identification process of exhumed remains, believed to belong to missing persons in Cyprus. The President announced that soon the first 280 samples of remains, believed to belong to about 70 missing persons, will be delivered to the International Commission on Missing Persons. He also said that the remains of 330 missing persons have been identified, 66 of whom are Turkish Cypriots and the rest Greek Cypriots. He stressed that the healing process for the families of missing persons will only end when the remains of the last of those victims are identified, on the basis of international law. The European Court of Human Rights established that there had been continuing violations by Turkey of Articles 2, 3 and 5 of the Convention concerning the right to life, liberty and security and prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment. Turkey was found to have failed to conduct an effective investigation into the fate of the Greek Cypriot missing persons who disappeared in life-threatening circumstances or were in Turkish custody at the time of their disappearance.
Mehmet Ali Talat, a leftist like  Christofias, was  president until 2010 of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. He said  he wanted a Cypriot federation with a central government and a shared flag  but “the Greek Cypriots aren’t cooperating.” The north has increasingly attracted undesirable elements. Turkish Cyprus attracts fugitives seeking sanctuary in a territory without extradition arrangements, smugglers, human traffickers and gamblers. Electricians, plumbers and bricklayers cross the border to work in  EU territory. Some 80,000 Turkish Cypriots, or about one-third of the population in the north, now have EU passports. They can obtain health insurance and medical treatment in the south, and board direct flights to other countries.
Nicosia is internationally recognised as the capital of Cyprus but buffer zone runs through Ledra Street dividing Greeks and Turks, although the street was re-opened on 3 April 2008.
Eleni Mavrou, a Greek Cypriot MP said in 2005: “Reconciliation means facing our past. It involves accepting the mistakes of  the other side and accepting that both sides have suffered in one way or another and through this process facing the future. It means understanding that we cannot continue living in the past so we should concentrate on the possibility, the capability of creating something together for the future. In the political realm, it means a dialogue that should lead to an agreement on the future constitutional, territorial, settlement of the Cyprus problem.

Reconciliation in Guatemala

Malign Presidents

Ike and Tricky Dick

The only US president I ever saw live and in the flesh was Dwight D Eisenhower. This was in 1962 after he had been replaced by JFK. Ike and Mamie were disembarking from a transatlantic liner at Cobh, County Cork. Eisenhower was the epitome of all that was dull about the 50s. After Eisenhower left office, his reputation declined. Historians have been revising opinions since then. Eisenhower made a good impression with his warning in his farewell address in 1961  about the threat posed by the “military-industrial complex”.

As early as 1953 he had said: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children”.

I have described in previous articles the malign influence in Latin America of US presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and Saint Jimmy Carter. Does that mean Ike is off the hook? No it does not! Just like other US presidents Eisenhower was willing to do the bidding of Big Banana.

In recent surveys of historians, Eisenhower often is ranked in the top 10 among all U.S. Presidents. Guatemalans might not agree.

Colonial Legacy
As in many of the conflicts I have examined in these articles, the seeds of Guatemalan suffering were sown by imperialism. Spanish conquistador Pedro de Alvarada (1485-1541) subjugated  the Mayan city-states in the 1500s. Land ownership, mineral production, and agriculture were organized to benefit the imperial power. Even after  independence and  the  lands of the indigenous people  continued to be confiscated.

Deadly Inequality
A grossly unequal distribution of wealth led to continuing conflict with civil rights groups as well as guerrilla groups being labelled “communist” by the US. Guatemala became a Cold War pawn, local campaigners were called communist even if they were fighting for social justice. During the long civil, over 150,000 Guatemalans were  killed or disappeared, and millions were made homeless.

Beatriz Manz, in her  book, Paradise in Ashes, wrote: “The best land is dominated by export-oriented plantations. Three % of landholdings control 65 % of the agricultural surface, while close to 90 % of the landholdings are too small for peasant subsistence…the vast majority of people [are] excluded from basic constitutional guarantees… 60%  of the population lives on less than one dollar per day. More than 95 % of the poor in Guatemala have not attended a single grade of secondary education, and 44 percent have never attended school at all.”

US Involvement
In the 1920s, after a century of involvement in agriculture in Guatemala and the export of its food crops, the US established military missions and  Guatemala’s military was tied to the US through training, aid, and a commitment to protect US economic interests. The Army dominated all aspects of life. Under dictator Jorge Ubico (1931-1944), the  United Fruit Company  gained control of 42% of Guatemala’s land, and was exempted from taxes and import duties. 77% of all exports went to the US and 65% of imports came from the US.

United Fruit, Guatemala’s largest landowner, with 85% of its holdings uncultivated, had long been lobbying the CIA to oust reform governments in Guatemala. In 1954, when the Eisenhower administration was still flush with victory after toppling the Mossadegh government in Iran, United Fruit got its wish. Substantial evidence points to the role of the United Fruit Company, which had several direct ties to the CIA, in the 1954  coup.
Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ law firm had prepared United Fruit’s contracts with Guatemala; his brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles, belonged to United Fruit’s law firm; John Moors Cabot, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, was the brother of a former United Fruit president; President Eisenhower’s personal secretary was married to the head of United Fruit’s Public Relations Department.

Allen Dulles head of CIA

The US Abolishes Spring

Guatemala has suffered much oppression,  but between 1945 and 1954, there was an experiment with democracy called the “Ten Years of Springtime”. This started with the election of Juan Jose Arevalo to the presidency. Arevalo established the nation’s social security and health systems and a government bureau to look after Mayan interests.

In 1954, the freely elected successor to Arevalo, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the CIA. Land reform had been the main plank of Arbenz’s election platform. An elite 2% of the population owned 70% of the land. Arbenz’s programme was in effect for 18 months, during which 1,500,000 acres were distributed to about 100,000 families. Árbenz himself gave up 1,700 acres  of his own land.

Arbenz

With  US help, Colonel Castillo Armas became the new president. The US Ambassador furnished Armas with lists of radical opponents to be eliminated. Thousands were arrested and many were tortured and killed. United Fruit got all its land back.
Greg Grandin wrote: “ In neither El Salvador nor Guatemala was there even a whiff of serious rural insurrection when the Green Berets, the CIA and the U.S. Agency for International Development began organizing the first security units that would metastasize into a dense, Central America-wide network of death-squad paramilitaries.” Grandin  remarks that “Washington, of course, publicly denied its support for paramilitarism, but the practice of political disappearances took a great leap forward in Guatemala in 1966 with the birth of a death squad created, and directly supervised, by U.S. security advisors.” Between March 3 and March 5 of 1966, more  than 30 leftists were captured, interrogated, tortured and executed. Their bodies were then placed in sacks and dropped into the Pacific Ocean from U.S.-supplied helicopters.

More Malign Presidents
US support for barbarity continued under several administrations (to be fair to Jimmy Carter, in 1979 he ordered a ban on all military aid to the Guatemalan Army). The Reagan Administration signalled to the Guatemalan Army its approval for winning the war by whatever methods and lobbied Congress for more aid. Anyone attempting to improve the lot of the peasants was subject to torture, mutilation, and death. Men were found decapitated or castrated. Some had their eyes gouged-out, their testicles cut off and put in their mouths, their hands or tongues cut off; women had their breasts cut off.

General Efrain Rios Montt, a graduate of the School of the Americas (SOA), came to power in a 1982 coup. He stated that he had “declared a state of siege so that we could kill legally”. Rios Montt moved the war from urban centres to the countryside where “the spirit of the lord” guided him against “communist subversives’, mostly indigenous Indians. During the 17 months of Rios Montt’s “Christian” campaign, 400 villages were destroyed, 10 – 20,000 Indians were killed, and over 100,000 fled to Mexico. Early in 1983, President Reagan resumed military shipments to Guatemala, claiming that Montt’s program against the guerrilla insurgency was working.

Reagan’s war on drugs had no significant impact on drug production and trafficking but the  spraying of lethal herbicides by anti-drug helicopters and planes caused widespread damage, poisoning large numbers of people, animals, fish, and plants.

In 1989, the Bush pére administration, under the guise of humanitarian aid, sent National Guard units to Guatemala to provide medical services. They served in areas where the guerrilla movement was the strongest. As villagers were getting “humanitarian” help, they were questioned about the type of organizations they had, who their leaders were, and what type of people visited their community.

 

Ros Montt

US-Sponsored Genocide

The Guatemalan atrocities are  sometimes called ‘The Silent Holocaust’. In one of the earliest counter-insurgency operations in 1966, the military killed an estimated 10,000 people to eliminate a band of just 100 rebels. Children were often beaten against walls, or thrown alive into pits where the bodies of adults were later thrown; they were also tortured and raped. Victims of all ages often had their limbs amputated, or were impaled and left to die slowly. Others were doused in petrol and set alight, or disembowelled while still alive. Yet others were shot repeatedly, or tortured and shut up alone to die in pain. The wombs of pregnant women were cut open. Women were routinely raped while being tortured. Women – now widows – who lived could scarcely survive the trauma: ‘the presence of sexual violence in the social memory of the communities has become a source of collective shame’.”
Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Reconciliation was  hard when so many civilians had taken part in atrocities and were now shielded by an amnesty law bitterly resented by victims. There were also many guerrillas and ex-soldiers to demobilise and resettle. All the same, a policy of reconciliation was introduced and, with difficulty, maintained.
According to the U.N.-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification,  which began work in July 1997,  government forces and state-sponsored paramilitaries were responsible for over 93% of the human rights violations during the war. The report recommended: the memory of the victims should be preserved, there should be compensation, and the democratic process should be strengthened.

In April 1998, another report, the Catholic Church’s “Recuperation of Historical Memory” (also called “Never Again”), was published. The report was publicly presented by Bishop Juan Gerardi; two days later he was murdered. In June 2001 a former head of military intelligence (a graduate of the School of the Americas) and two other officers were sentenced to 30 years in prison for the murder.

Bishop Gerardi

Millions of documents related to crimes committed during the civil war were found abandoned by the former Guatemalan police and could form the basis for future prosecutions. The current democratically-elected president, Otto Pérez Molina, could be a barrier to further legal action as he, a retired general, was the head of intelligence in Guatemala during the civil war. American journalist Francisco Goldman has presented  evidence that Pérez may have participated in the 1998 conspiracy to murder Bishop Gerardi. American lawyer Jennifer Harbury has suggested  that Pérez probably issued the orders to detain and torture her husband the guerrilla leader Efraín Bámaca Velásquez In 1992.
Guatemala Today
The conflict officially ended in 1996. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported in 1999.  Is Guatemala in 2012 a nation at peace with itself?
Vigilante justice is  widespread in Guatemala . There was a recent press report of  a  mob burning a police station after police  intervened to stop the lynching of five accused killers. There were 35 attempted lynchings in the first three months of 2012. Lynchings of suspected criminals increased from 25 in 2004 to 147 in the first ten months of 2011.The 651 instances of “people’s justice” during those seven years resulted in 216 deaths and left another 911 victims seriously injured.
On the night of 12 June 2012, José Tavico Tzunun was murdered in Santa Cruz del Qiché. He helped to organise the town’s referendum on establishing a moratorium on mining and dams. The following day anti-mining activist Yolanda Oquelí was shot while driving home from a barricade against a proposed gold mine in her community of San Jose del Golfo.
Although the conquistadors ended their pillage centuries ago, Mayans are still prey to extractive multi-national companies.

Reconciliation in Honduras

Malign Influence of US in Latin America.

Honduras, like many another Latin American nation, has suffered from its proximity to its powerful northern neighbour. The US commitment to capitalism and opposition to communism has meant that it has been prepared to support the use of terror and torture in Latin America.  In 2012, however, perhaps the greatest danger to the citizens of Honduras arises from the drug-taking habits of US citizens.

Ousting of Manuel Zelaya

The Honduran Truth and Reconciliation commission was set up to investigate the  constitutional crisis in 2009 which culminated in the ousting of democratically-elected president Manuel Zelaya. However, the troubles of this benighted nation go back much further than 2009.

Zelaya was popular in some quarters and his  economic and social policies earned him praise from labour unions and civil society groups. He  planned to convert the Soto Cano Air Base, where one of the three US Southern Command Task forces is based, into a civilian airport. His attempts to forge alliances with the leftish administrations of Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela, caused anxiety in some US circles.

There was widespread international condemnation of the “coup”. All Latin American nations (with the exception of Honduras itself), as well as the US, United Nations, and others, publicly condemned Zelaya’s ousting. Every country in the region, except the US, withdrew their ambassadors from Honduras. All EU ambassadors were withdrawn from the country. President Obama said: “We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the President of Honduras.” A good detailed description of the events can be found at

http://www.optimumonline.ca/article.phtml?e=mesokurj&id=402&page=10

Truth and Reconciliation Commission

A Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established in May 2010 to investigate the crisis of 2009.  The Commission concluded that Zelaya’s  removal from office was a coup but also criticised Zelaya. It said the move was illegal and not a constitutional succession as some of Zelaya’s opponents said. The Commission identified Zelaya’s decision to press ahead with a referendum on constitutional change as “a point of no return”. Zelaya’s opponents  argued that the referendum was aimed at removing the current one-term limit on serving as president. Zelaya  repeatedly denied this. The report also said that 20 people were killed in the repression which followed the coup.

Michael Kergin a retired Canadian career diplomat,  was a member of the Honduran TRC. He wrote: “There are indeed factors which might explain, but do not excuse, the excessive use of force during this period: a traditional culture of violence in Honduras, decentralized control over a widely and thinly dispersed police force; and a lack of professional training at the operational level. The small country was also suffering collective paranoia out of its isolation from the international community, exacerbated by its former president testing its borders with support from South American heavy hitters such as Brazil, Venezuela and Argentina.”

The Power of Fruit

The USA has bullied  Honduran governments  since the late 19th century mainly to support the dominance of US companies, like the United Fruit Company, who built an enclave economy in the north controlling infrastructure and creating self-sufficient, tax exempt sectors that contributed relatively little to national economic growth, but attracted thousands of workers from other parts of the country. The fruit companies also encouraged immigration of workers from Jamaica and Belize thus introducing  an African descended, English speaking and largely Protestant population into the country, fuelling ethnic tensions.

Defending Freedom against Communism

Honduras did not suffer as horrific a conflict as neighbouring El Salvador  but the Honduran army  quietly waged a campaign against  communist  militias like the  Cinchoneros Popular Liberation Movement, who employed kidnappings and bombings in their fight against the government.  The Cinchoneros claimed to represent the country’s poor and opposed Honduras’ right-wing governments, though their revolutionary agenda was never a serious threat. However, their links with other Latin American guerrilla groups caused the US anxiety.

During the early 1980s, the US maintained a military presence in Honduras in order to support the Nicaraguan contras. There was  a CIA-backed campaign of extrajudicial killings by government-backed units, most notably Battalion 316. Battalion 601 had collaborated in assassinations with the Chilean DINA. They also collaborated with the Argentinian Anti-Communist Alliance. At least 19 Battalion 316 members were graduates of the US School of the Americas. Training was also  provided in Pinochet’s Chile.

Reconciliation

Reconciliation was moved along in May 2011 when a court decided to drop the last of the charges, these relating to corruption, that were levelled against Zelaya following his removal. Zelaya returned to Honduras in May 2011 and told a roaring crowd: “The problem of poverty, of corruption … will not be solved with violence, but through more democracy, greater citizen participation and better transparency.”

Current President Porfirio Lobo was democratically elected, but the legality of his position is compromised by the ousting of Zelaya. Under President Lobo, Zelaya returned to a country that has enacted many of the changes he advocated before his removal, including a change in the procedures for amending the constitution. In a recent demonstration of Honduran progress, Zelaya spoke to a National Popular Resistance Front rally and encouraged peaceful change.

Crime, Drugs  and Human Rights

According to Guatemala’s planning minister, Fernando Carrera: “Honduras is today one of the most violent countries in the world, and the principal thoroughfare for drugs on their way from the producing countries in the south to the consuming countries in the north.” Drug cartels bribe security forces and judges to look the other way. Honduran security chief Oscar Álvarez resigned because he said he lacked the resources to stem police corruption.

Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world at 82 homicides per 100,000 people in 2010, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Some, such as Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina, suggest the only answer is to stop fighting drug trafficking and legalize it.

Despite growing support for de-criminalisation in the US, the US is standing firm against it. Many Latin American governments are calling legalisation to ease the problems they have because of the drug culture of US citizens.

Obama Calls for more Human Rights

In an April 26 conversation with President Lobo, U.S. President Barack Obama expressed his concern about human rights in Honduras. A number of journalists and civic activists have been killed.  President Lobo has responded by naming a special human rights advisor to ensure that these killings and other acts of intimidation are investigated. He welcomed a team from the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights to visit Honduras
Current  news is that Obama decided to allow hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants no older than 30 with high school degrees and no criminal history a chance to stay and work in the US. The president has said that as many as 800,000 young illegal immigrants living in the U.S. could benefit from the change. However, this was too late for Marlon Roberto Cortes who is back in Tegucigalpa. Cortes handcuffed and hauled to a holding centre in Boston and deported to Honduras  in March without being able to say goodbye to his family.

“The country in which I could have had the chance to get ahead is the United States,” Cortes said. “I did everything I had to do to get that and I don’t understand why they wouldn’t let me … I feel more American than Honduran.”

Trade Imbalance, Sweat Shops and Export of Workers

In 2003, Honduras sent around 370 soldiers to Iraq to support the US invasion. This was largely an attempt to improve foreign relations with the US over the issue of the many thousands of Hondurans working in the US . The money these migrants send back to their families in Honduras is a crucial factor in the Honduran economy.
The relationship between the US and Latin America is a complex and unequal one. The USA is Honduras’s chief trading partner, with two-way trade in goods increasing to over $7 billion in 2006. Trade is dominated by the maquila industry, which imports yarn and textiles from the US and exports finished clothing. Two-thirds of the foreign direct investment comes from the US.

Reconciliation and the Future

According to Michael Kergin: “Lack of confidence in the instruments of government to effect reform remains widespread throughout the country. Hondurans often look to the international community to address domestic problems … Audiences were not impressed with the commissioners’ observation that change imposed from outside and without the support of the Hondurans themselves and their institutions of government would not endure or prosper.”

Kergin believes: “The chances of avoiding the mistakes of the past are improved when Hondurans discuss ways of strengthening their institutions of government. By looking to the future, rather than by exhuming past divisions, Hondurans are more likely to reach some form of lasting accommodation. To the extent that the Honduran Commission has facilitated a dialogue of reconciliation, its work will have been worthwhile.”
However, while President Lobo  has some  popular support, there is a general view that he will be unable to prevail against entrenched interests. There is little  confidence that legislators will be prepared to undertake the necessary institutional reforms or liberate the political party structure from the preponderant influence of the economic oligarchs.