Suicide of a Superpower_Will America Survive to 2025?
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But India’s troubles only begin in Kashmir. The Tamils in the south still seethe over their kinsmen’s failure to carve a nation out of Sri Lanka, apart from the Sinhalese. Tens of thousands died in that island’s civil war that ended in May 2009. Delhi intervened in 1987 in what came to be called India’s Vietnam.
Nagaland, one of India’s smallest states, the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island, borders Burma and, with a Christian population, has hosted an independence movement since 1947. Perhaps the most powerful forces that threaten India’s stability and unity are the Maoist Naxalites who have battled New Delhi since 1967 and boast ten to twenty thousand fighters. In a recent ambush, 76 Indian soldiers were massacred. In May 2010, a high-speed train was derailed when Maoists cut out a foot of track. Eighty-one civilians were killed, more than 200 wounded. Naxalites are our “first enemy,” says Home Secretary G. K. Pillai.84 Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told police chiefs in Delhi the violence is increasing in the Naxalite war that has already taken 6,000 lives and the Maoists are winning the struggle to carve out a Communist state: “I have consistently held that in many ways, left-wing extremism poses perhaps the gravest internal security threat our country faces.”85
Other secessionists are battling to break apart India’s twenty-eight states. The strongest is the drive to separate Talangana from Andhra Pradesh. Hunger strikes by Talangana leaders and suicides by students have brought the cause to the attention of the world and put it on the docket of the Congress Party.
Given the tension between Muslim and Hindu, the language and cultural differences, the disparities of wealth between middle and upper classes and the dirt-poor hundreds of millions, India is a prime candidate for ethnonational insurrections throughout the twenty-first century.
In Burma, the junta has deployed thousands of troops to the north to put down Kokang, Wa, and Kachin rebels. The Kokang, many of whom are ethnic Chinese, have fled in the tens of thousands to China’s Yunnan.86 In the east, the Karen have conducted the world’s longest-running insurgency, since Burma became a nation in 1948. With the release of Nobel laureate and pro-democracy heroine Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest, a question arises: Would a democratic Burma suppress the rebels to hold Burma together as the junta has done?
Ethnic minorities make up 40 percent of the population and the tribes have resisted domination since Britain gave Burma its independence. “Social conflict based on ethnicity has been at the heart of Burma’s political failure for decades,” says Andrew Heyn, the British ambassador in Rangoon.87
In Thailand, Malays have attacked Buddhist monks and temples and officials of the government. Their goal: an Islamic Malay nation wedged between Thailand and Malaysia. “Terrorist attacks in the villages of southern Thailand have reached an all-time high, as schools become breeding grounds for young fighters,” reports the Washington Times. “Thailand Muslims reject anything modern and forms of entertainment, including televisions, except to watch soccer matches,” said a counselor at the Thai embassy.88
On December 31, 2009, after a court ruling in Malaysia granted Christians the right to use the name Allah when speaking of God, seven churches were firebombed. As religion correlates with race in Malaysia—the constitution equates Muslim and Malay—critics charged the regime with exploiting a religious clash to incite race resentment. The Chinese and Indian minorities are Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian.89
Jacqueline Ann Surin, editor of a Malaysian news site, told the New York Times, “Malaysia is peculiar in that we have race-based politics and over the past decade or so we have seen an escalation of the notion that Malay Malaysians are superior.… So it’s a logical progression that if the Malay is considered superior by the state to all others in Malaysia, then Islam will also be deemed superior to other religions.”90
In Mindanao, a Moro separatist movement has been fighting on and off for the half millennium since the Spanish conquered the Philippines and Catholicism became the national faith. Their religion and their resistance have created a new people. “We don’t believe we are Filipinos,” says Kim Bagundang, of the Linguasan Youth Association. “That’s the essential problem.” The Moros seek to have the Muslim lands of Mindanao declared an “ancestral domain” where they will rule and their Islamic faith and culture will be dominant.91
In Central Mindanao in late 2009, a convoy of 57 journalists and lawyers and the wife and relatives of a local vice mayor was intercepted by 100 armed men.92 The women were raped, the entire party murdered, with many mutilated in what is called the Maguindanao massacre. The atrocity was “unequaled in recent history,” said an adviser to President Arroyo. “The Muslim insurgency has killed about 120,000 people since the 1970s,” the Washington Post reported, an astonishingly high figure.93 On accepting his Nobel peace prize, Barack Obama recognized the new reality that many statesmen yet fail to see:
[The] old architecture is buckling under the weight of new threats.… wars between nations have increasingly given way to wars within nations. The resurgence of ethnic or sectarian conflicts, the growth of secessionist movements, insurgencies and failed states … have increasingly trapped civilians in unending chaos.94
“It is useless to say that nationalism and ethnic tribalism have no place in the international relations of the 21st century,” says the British diplomat Sir Christopher Meyer. “If anything the spread of Western-style democracy has amplified their appeal and resonance.”95
“OUR GREATEST ENEMY IS ETHNIC NATIONALISM”
In the fall of 2009, Jundallah (God’s Brigade) of Sistan-Baluchistan carried out a spectacular act of terror, killing forty Iranians including a brigadier general of the Revolutionary Guard. Tehran accused the United States of fomenting ethnic separatism to break up the country or bring about regime change. A million Baluch live in Iran where Arabs, Azeris, Kurds, and other minorities constitute half the population, with Persians the other half.
There are five million Baluch in Pakistan where the oil- and gas-rich province of Baluchistan is 40 percent of the national territory. Baluchi grievances against the army and regime are mounting. “Baluch nationalism is more broad-based, is a more serious phenomenon than at any time in the past,” says Selig Harrison, of the Center for International Policy, an authority on the Baluch, who seek to carve a new nation out of Pakistan and Iran.96
Iraq is Sunni, Shia, and Christian; Arab, Kurd, and Turkomen. No one rules out a return to sectarian or civil war when the Americans depart, or an Arab-Kurd clash over Kirkuk. Kurds in Turkey’s south and east number, by some counts, 20 to 25 million. This Kurdish enclave looks over the border to Iraqi Kurdistan with its population of five million as model and magnet. In July 2010, the president of Iraq’s Kurdish region, Massoud Barzani, told an Egyptian television station, “The Kurdish nation … should have its own state like the Turkish, Persian and Arab nations. We are not claiming we are stronger than them, but we have nothing less than those nations.”97 Were one to wager on new nations being born, Kurdistan, Baluchistan, Palestine, and Pashtunistan would be among the favorites.
The Pashtun, from whom many of the Taliban came, are the largest Afghan tribe, occupying the nation’s south and east, while the Hazara are in the central mountains. Tajiks and Uzbeks made up most of the Northern Alliance the Americans conscripted to take down the Taliban. There may be 35 to 40 million Pashtun, a population larger than that of many European nations. Most live in Pakistan, where they give sanctuary to their Afghan cousins. That Tajiks are coming to dominate the army is certain to deepen Pashtun resistance to the American-backed regime of President Hamid Karzai.
“Ethnic chauvinism, which has long bedeviled this fiercely tribal country and fueled a destructive civil war in the 1990s, is erupting again,” wrote Washington Post foreign correspondent Pamela Constable from Kabul on Christmas Eve 2010.98
In the 2010 elections, the Hazara, a repressed Shia minority, converted themselves into a tribal party and won every seat in the province of Ghazni. The majority Pashtun, divided in their loya
lties between Karzai and the Taliban, threatened with reprisals if they voted, stayed home. The Hazara came out and won 50 of 249 seats in the lower house of parliament. But they are understandably nervous over their success. “This is a multiethnic country, and all groups need to be represented,” said Dr. Amin Ahmadi, dean of two small Hazara Shiite colleges in Kabul. “Our greatest enemy is ethnic nationalism.”99
THE ENDURING TRIBALISM OF AFRICA
Nigeria’s civil war, where a million perished, was an ethnonational war of secession by the Ibo. When, after years of civil war, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, the Mashona of Robert Mugabe proceeded to massacre 7,000 Matabele of rival Joshua Nkomo’s tribe to teach him a lesson. In Rwanda, Hutu massacred Tutsi. After the 2008 elections in Kenya, the Kikuyu of Mau Mau chief and founding father Jomo Kenyatta were ethnically cleansed by the Luo.
“More than 2,000 people have been killed this year in ethnically driven battles” in southern Sudan, reported the New York Times in 2009. The massacres were the work of Nuer warriors against Dinka villagers in Jonglei state.100 The Muslim north may have been stirring up tribal war to divide the Christian and animist south before the 2011 election to determine whether the south would secede. Between north and south, the conflict is religious and racial. Within the south it is tribal.
In January 2011, the south voted 99–1 to secede and create the Republic of South Sudan, a decision described by one Cairo press observer as a “dangerous precedent in an Arab world looking increasingly fractured along sectarian and ethnic lines.” Salama Ahmed Salama, of al-Shorouk, dissented: “The lesson we must all learn is that secession … can be the road to safety when union becomes a heavy and unbearable burden on people.”101
Across the Red Sea, war-torn Yemen, with Sanhan, Mareb, and Jahm among the dominant tribes, is in danger of splitting apart. In the oil-rich but poor and populous south, which includes the old British colony of Aden that became a Marxist state before uniting with the north in 1990, a secessionist movement is building. A north-south civil war was fought in 1994. The forces pulling Yemen apart are religious—the Houthi rebels in the north are Shia—and tribal. Says Gregory Johnson, of Princeton:
Secession is a major problem for Yemen … the government’s inability to put down the rebellion in the north has certainly emboldened calls for secession in the south. If the Yemeni state falls apart, I do not believe it will separate into two pieces along the pre-unification lines prior to 1990. It will be much messier and much more chaotic than a simple bifurcation would suggest.102
A fractured Yemen that shares a border with Saudi Arabia would be perilous for Riyadh and create new opportunities for al-Qaeda, which already has a presence there and across the Red Sea in Somalia.
In Lebanon, the divisions are ideological, religious, and ethnic: Falange and Hezbollah, Muslim and Christian, Sunni and Shia, Arab and Druze. According to scholar Donald L. Horowitz:
Connections among Biafra, Bangladesh, and Burundi, Beirut, Brussels, and Belfast were at first hesitantly made—isn’t one “tribal,” another “linguistic,” another “religious”?—but that is true no longer. Ethnicity has fought and bled and burned its way into public and scholarly consciousness.103
The point is crucial. As Catholicism was integral to Irish identity in the 1919–1921 rising and to Polish identity in resistance to Communism, religion has become a feature of sacred identity.
Two days after the fall of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Colonel Muammar Khadafi in Libya, suddenly threatened himself, sought to redirect Arab rage against the West by melding religious and racial identity. On the birthday of the Prophet, he issued a call to Muslim countries to join forces, saying the world was divided into white, denoting America, Europe, and Israel, and green, for the Muslim world.
“The white colour has decided to get rid of the green colour,” said Khadafi. “These [Muslim] countries should be united against the white colour because all of these white countries are the enemies of Islam.”104
When a rebellion erupted to depose him, and America intervened to prevent what Obama said was an imminent massacre in Benghazi, Khadafi instantly played the tribal card, declaring “colonialist crusaders,” i.e., white Christians, are coming again to conquer our Arab and Muslim land.
Under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party, Turkey is shedding a secular identity formalized by the founding father of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, in 1923, and reassuming its religious identity as an Islamic nation that belongs with the Islamic world as much or more than it does with the West. Their Islamic identity has also made of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon far more formidable foes of Israel than Yasser Arafat’s secular PLO ever was.
Israel is a nation where constant conflict rages between democratist ideology, Zionist ethnonationalism, and religious fundamentalism. Netanyahu and Likud insist that, as a precondition for a Palestinian state, the Palestinians must recognize Israel as a “Jewish state” whose character must forever remain Jewish. This will not be easy to sustain, as the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics has identified 2014 as the year when Arabs west of the Jordan—in Israel, Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank—at 6.1 million, equal and begin to outnumber the Jewish population.105
The goal of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and his nationalist party, Yisrael Beiteinu, is “ethnic cleansing,” writes the American Prospect: “[A]s the creepy name (which translates into ‘Our Home Is Israel’) suggests, Yisrael Beiteinu believes the million-plus Arab citizens of Israel must be expelled.”106 Lieberman’s politics are described by the former editor of the New Republic, Peter Beinart:
In his youth, he briefly joined Meir Kahane’s now banned Kach Party, which … advocated the expulsion of Arabs from Israeli soil. Now Lieberman’s position might be called “pre-expulsion.” He wants to revoke the citizenship of Israeli Arabs who won’t swear a loyalty oath to the Jewish state.… He said Arab Knesset members who met with representatives of Hamas should be executed. He wants to jail Arabs who publicly mourn on Israeli Independence Day, and he hopes to permanently deny citizenship to Arabs from other countries who marry Arab citizens of Israel.107
What is Avigdor Lieberman but an ethnonationalist?
Israel’s demand that she be formally recognized as a “Jewish state,” even by her own non-Jewish citizens, represents a claim that Israel is an ethnonational state of, by, and for Jews. Former Israeli ambassador to the United States David Ivry, who claims he persuaded an aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell to insert the phrase “Jewish state” for the first time in a major U.S. address on the Middle East, defines its ethnonational meaning precisely and coldly: “The Palestinians should have no right of return; only Jewish refugees can ever come back.”108
THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ REVOLT
Evo Morales was elected president in 2005 determined to redistribute Bolivian wealth to his own Aymara tribe and the “indigenous peoples” he claims were robbed by white men who came after Columbus. With Hugo Chávez, Morales is goading the Indians to take back what was allegedly stolen from them. And he has met with no small success.
“Vote Reflects Racial Divide,” ran the banner over a story datelined Santa Cruz that began, “The Bolivian vote to approve a new constitution backed by Leftist President Evo Morales reflected racial divisions between the nation’s Indian majority and those with European ancestry.”
While the predominantly white and mestizo provinces voted against Morales’s constitution, it won huge majorities among the Indian tribes of the western highlands. For the new constitution is about group rights. By Article 190, Bolivia’s thirty-six Indian areas are authorized to “exercise their jurisdictional functions through their own principles, values, cultures, norms and procedures.” Tribal law is to become provincial law and, one day, national law. Pizarro’s triumph over the Incas is to be overturned. Governor Mario Cossío of Tarija province, which voted no, says the new constitution will create a “totalitarian regime” run by an “ethnical
ly based bureaucracy.”109 Opponents, reports the Economist, say the “community justice” provisions of the constitution “will politicize justice … and legitimize mob justice in the form of lynchings and stonings, which have become more common over the past two years.”110
Morales replies: “Original Bolivians who have been here for a thousand years are many but poor. Recently arrived Bolivians are few but rich.”111
Josh Partlow, of the Washington Post, writes that the dividing line in Bolivia “transcends economics and has laid bare cultural and geographic differences as well. People from the Andean highlands, with its indigenous majority, often accuse those of Spanish descent in the lowlands [of Santa Cruz] of having a racist agenda.”112
“Everything looks bad to the people who used to be in power,” said Felipe Montevilla, 55, a man of the Aymara ethnic group who attended a Morales rally in the town of Viacha, on the high plateau above the national capital, La Paz. “For 500 years, they never had to tip their hat to an indigenous man. This problem is primarily racist,” Montevilla said.113
Morales is using principles and procedures invented by white men—universal franchise and majority rule—to dispossess white men. He is using democratic means for tribal ends, imposing Indian law where Indians are the majority. The nineteenth-century French rightist Louis Veuillot explained how anti-democrats would dispossess the democrats: “When I am the weaker I ask you for my freedom because that is your principle; but when I am the stronger I take away your freedom because that is my principle.”114