“’This is something similar to what occurred in Gaza or worse, because neither observers nor journalists had access to the war zone,’ stated a UN source who asked for anonymity. The army acknowledges that 6,200 soldiers and 22,000 guerrillas died in the last three years of the longest civil war in Asia. The UN affirms that between 80,000 and 100,000 persons died in the conflict,” wrote Elisa Reche of Prensa Marea Socialista.

“During the war,” Reche continued, “the army had 200,000 troops. Now with peace, 100,000 are being incorporated… A strange peace it is that requires more troops than in actual combat.”

More troops are needed because systematic ethnic cleansing is now the order of the day for the Tamil people. Their Homeland will be obliterated by introducing more Sinhalese settlers. The same strategy, as John Pilger pointed out, that Israel uses against Palestinians.

This is what M.K. Bhadrakumar, an ambassador for India who served in Sri Lanka and other countries, wrote about the day after Sri Lanka declared victory.

See, they have already solved the Tamil problem in the eastern provinces… The Tamils are no more the majority community in these provinces. Similarly, from tomorrow, they will commence a concerted, steady colonization program of the Northern provinces where Prabhakaran reigned supreme for two decades. They will ensure incrementally that the northern regions no more remain as Tamil provinces… Give them a decade at the most. The Tamil problem will become a relic of the bloody history of the Indian sub-continent.

Ethnic cleansing goes hand-in-hand with the policy of imprisoning and mistreating hundreds of thousands of Tamils. For more than a year before its military victory, the Sri Lanka government enticed Tamils, wishing to flee the war zone, into so-called “welfare” centers or villages. Tens of thousands became “Internally Displaced Persons” (IDP), and are thus subject to United Nations regulations concerning decent living conditions, food and water, freedom of movement and the right to leave and rejoin families. All these rights and necessities have been denied them.

“Really if I starve the Tamils out, the Sinhala people will be happy,” President J.R. told the Daily Telegraph, (UK) on July 11, 1983.

A quarter-century later, the current president is striving to fulfill his predecessor’s genocidal intentions. Mahinda Rajapakse has claimed that no IDP is held against his/her will and all are treated well. However, the few United Nations visitors—there are no official investigators into abuses since the Human Rights Council majority blocked such a possibility—who come to observe have quite another picture.

When UN’s political chief, Lynn Pascoe, visited camps in September he said people were not free or well treated… “this kind of closed regime goes directly against the principles under which we work in assisting IDPs all around the world.”

Rajapakse told Pascoe another tale about “free movement”. He said that detention was necessary because the army was clearing the area for mines, and it was still looking for guerrillas hiding among civilians. However, as the UN resident coordinator reported, and Amnesty Internationalquoted: “Under international humanitarian law, captured combatants…may be held pending the cessation of hostilities. Once active hostilities have ceased, prisoners of war must be released ‘without delay.’”

At of July, there were 9,400 individuals with purported links to the LTTE held separately from the rest of the population. They have not been released nearly half-a-year after internment.

Amnesty International also reported that the camps are clearly militarized. The 19-member Presidential Task Force established in mid-May “to plan and coordinate resettlement, rehabilitation and development of the Northern Province” is headed Major General CA Chandrasiri, who was also appointed governor of the province. All inmates are enclosed by barbed-wire fences, guarded and brutalized by well-armed soldiers.

“Arrests have been reported from the camps and Sri Lankan human rights defenders have alleged that enforced disappearances have also occurred,” wrote Amnesty.

“Sri Lanka’s history of large-scale enforced disappearances dating back to the 1980s, and the lack of independent monitoring… raises grave concerns that enforced disappearances and other violations of human rights may be occurring… Previous research [shows] that [persons] suspected by the government of being members or supporters of LTTE are at grave risk of extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearance, and torture, cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.”

“Although the government calls these facilities ‘welfare villages,’ they are effectively detention camps…” Amnesty International also reported that not only are people not free to move as they wish, women and girls are raped by soldiers, and people live in sewage, disease-infested conditions, with little food and water and medical attention. They die in droves because of these imposed conditions.

Women and children are especially mistreated, which was the subject that James Elder, spokesperson for UNICEF, complained about to Sri Lankan authorities, who then expelled him from the country. Elder described the “unimaginable suffering” of children caught in the fighting, including babies he had seen with shrapnel wounds.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had refrained from criticizing Sri Lanka’s government, leveling his critique only at LTTE for carrying out atrocities. But when he briefly visited one camp less than a week after the end of the war, he said:

“I have traveled around the world and visited similar places, but this is by far the most appalling scenes I have seen…I sympathize fully with all of the displaced persons,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon told CNN after visiting Manik Farm, the most presentable of Sri Lanka’s squalid and dangerous internment camps for Tamils civilians. The UN Chief has also promised international action regarding the heavy shelling of civilian populations during the recent fighting.

Out of the 280,000 IDPs after the end of the war (there were nearly one-half million over a year’s period), only between 15,000 and 40,000 had been released by November 1. Half of them, perhaps, have been ransomed. The Sunday Times wrote about “human trafficking at the internment camps.” Relatives were made to pay camp authorities in order to secure their release.

Future

A week after the end of the war, the LTTE communicated that several of its leaders were killed, but the organization would continue struggling for an independent Tamil Eelam in peaceful ways. July 22, the LTTE announced that its chief of international relations, Selvarsa Pathmanathan—known as KP—was made the new leader, and that a new strategy for a “free Tamil Eelam” would occur. On August 8, England’s The Independent wrote that Pathmanathan was under arrest by Sri Lanka and held incommunicado.

For us solidarity activists, left-wing organizations, and governments considered to be progressive-socialist-communist-revolutionary, I believe that our task must be to press for the lives and rights of the Tamil people. Australia’s Democratic Socialist Perspective and Socialist Alliance said it well in its October 2009 international situation report:

Now the Tamil struggle has entered a new phase. The immediate campaign must focus on defence of basic human rights, release and resettlement of the Internally Displaced Persons currently held in SL government concentration camps, an end to murders, torture, rapes, and provision of basic housing, food and drinking water to the Tamil people under brutal occupation.

As a solidarity activist, who advocates the right to resist and the necessity to conduct armed struggle once peaceful means fail to induce oppressive and terrorist governments to engage in a process aimed at peace with justice, I condemn all perpetrators of terrorism and demand they change tactics to ones that are morally in accordance with our ideology for socialism, for justice with equality.

I find that most, if not all, armed movements commit acts of atrocities, even acts of terror in the long course of warfare. This has sometimes been the case with FARC and PFLP, for instance. But I support them in their righteous struggle. They are up against, as was the more brutal LTTE, much greater military and economic forces that practice state terror endemically. Remember the ANC in South Africa’s war for liberation. They committed much the same.

The main reason why I am on their side, why I have been a leftist solidarity activist and writer for nearly half-a-century is a matter of basic ethics. I define ethics in this way: Life shall not be abused or destroyed by our conscious hand—without being attacked, invaded, oppressed beyond bare. A moral person, organization, political party, government acts in daily life and in the struggle for justice with that ethic in mind. These are my thoughts on morality.

1. We act to so that no one person, race or ethnic group is either over or under another.
2. In combat against oppressors and invaders, we do not kill non-combatant civilians nor forcefully recruit them, or use them as hostages.
3. We struggle to create equality for all.
4. We abolish all profit-making based upon the exploitation of labor or the oppression of any person, group of people or class. Instead, we build an economy based upon principles of justice and equality, one in which no one goes hungry, sharing equitably our resources and production.
5. We struggle to create a political system based upon participation where all have a voice in decision-making of vital matters, in local, national and international policies.
6. We struggle to eliminate alienation in each of us.

After following liberated Cuba for half-a-century, having lived and worked there for eight years, I find that during its guerrilla struggle, which fortunately only lasted two years, it acted in a moral manner. Cuba’s revolutionary armed struggle was exceptional in this way. The Vietnamese struggle against the invaders of France and the USA was so conducted as well. There are a few other examples: the original Sandinistas is, perhaps, one.

I think that the key reason why so many millions of people the world love and respect Che Guevara is because of his moral stance, of his example as a just revolutionary leader. I conclude this all-too-long essay with these oft-quoted words from Che’s Socialism and Man.

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love… Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize this love of the people, the most sacred cause, and make it one and indivisible… one must have a great deal of humanity and a strong sense of justice and truth in order not to fall into extreme dogmatism and cold scholasticism, into an isolation from the masses. We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force.

State terrorism manifests itself in: 1) police state practices against its own people to dominate through fear by surveillance, disruption of group meetings, control of the news media, beatings, torture, false and mass arrests, false charges and rumors, show trials, killings, summary executions and capital punishments;

The terrorism of modern state power and its high technology weaponry exceeds qualitatively by many orders of magnitude the political violence relied upon by groups aspiring to undo oppression and achieve liberation.

…peoples who are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination have the right to use force to accomplish their objectives within the framework of international humanitarian law.

This document applies to the situation of the Sri Lankan governments since 1983 as well as to the LTTE, and the proportions of the use of violence are as written by the general assembly. The LTTE did, however, after time, go beyond the framework of international humanitarian law.

One voice regarding terrorism and what lies behind these atrocities appears so credible to me, and so tragic in itself, that I quote him extensively to show that all warring parties in Sri Lanka acted as terrorists. Here are some of the last words of Sri Lankan journalist Manilal Wickrematunge Lasantha, a Sinhalese, who predicted his assassination shortly before it occurred, on January 8, 2009. His newspaper, The Sunday Leader, published his own “obituary” three days later.

Terror, whether perpetrated by terrorists or the state, has become the order of the day. Indeed, murder has become the primary tool whereby the state seeks to control the organs of liberty…

Our commitment is to see Sri Lanka as a transparent, secular, liberal democracy… Secular because in a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society such as ours, secularism offers the only common ground by which we might all be united…

…we have consistently espoused the view that while separatist terrorism must be eradicated, it is more important to address the root causes of terrorism, and urged government to view Sri Lanka’s ethnic strife in the context of history and not through the telescope of terrorism. We have also agitated against state terrorism in the so-called war against terror, and made no secret of our horror that Sri Lanka is the only country in the world routinely to bomb its own citizens…

The LTTE are among the most ruthless and bloodthirsty organisations ever to have infested the planet. There is no gainsaying that it must be eradicated. But to do so by violating the rights of Tamil citizens, bombing and shooting them mercilessly, is not only wrong but shames the Sinhalese, whose claim to be custodians of the dhamma [the teachings of Buddha, which lead to enlightenment] is forever called into question by this savagery, much of which is unknown to the public because of censorship…

What is more, a military occupation of the country’s north and east will require the Tamil people of those regions to live eternally as second-class citizens, deprived of all self respect…

It is well known that I was on two occasions brutally assaulted, while on another my house was sprayed with machine-gun fire. Despite the government’s sanctimonious assurances, there was never a serious police inquiry into the perpetrators of these attacks, and the attackers were never apprehended. In all these cases, I have reason to believe the attacks were inspired by the government. When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me.

The irony in this is that, unknown to most of the public, Mahinda [Rajapakse, the president] and I have been friends for more than a quarter century… “Sadly, for all the dreams you had for our country in your younger days, in just three years you have reduced it to rubble. In the name of patriotism you have trampled on human rights, nurtured unbridled corruption and squandered public money like no other President before you…”

When Lasantha’s dramatic editorial appeared, he had already been murdered on his way to work by four men on motorcycles. The probable conspirator behind the execution was Lasantha’s “friend’s” brother, war secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse, a naturalized citizen of the USA. In December 2008, he had censored the Sunday Leader from publishing any criticism of his actions. He had earlier threatened the careers and lives of other journalists.

A week before Lasanth’s murder, G. Rajapakse’s army captured the capital of the de facto Eelam state, Kilinochchi. LTTE guerrilla army fled but not all the civilians had evacuated before the government’s troops entered and butchered scores or hundreds. On August 25, 2009, England’s Channel 4 News broadcast footage showing Sri Lankan forces executing nine Tamils stripped naked. One of the military’s soldiers had filmed this atrocity on his mobile telephone. Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka (Sinhalese and Tamils) obtained the film and presented it to Channel 4, which showed it after verifying its authenticity.

The United States government praised Sri Lanka for its military offensive. The US embassy in Colombo issued this statement: “The United States does not advocate that the Government of Sri Lanka negotiate with the LTTE…”

Following this crushing defeat, the LTTE was reduced to an area of a few square kilometers. Many thousands of civilians had left their homes to reach so-called No Fire Zones, which the S.L. army began setting up on January 20th. Conditions were sub-human (and they continue to be so for over two-hundred and fifty thousand interned civilians in various camps as of this writing), and they were (are) forced to remain. Amnesty International—more often than not a reliable observer of international conflicts, one of the few NGO’s that does not take money from any government or political party—recently published a report about these camps. Sri Lanka is violating rules established by the United Nations, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, applying to displaced persons.

Here is an excerpt from a civilian inmate.

“Knowing that many civilians were not able to move, the government restarted shelling. They even hit the No Fire Zone so even that small area was not protected…When we heard the supersonic Kfirs [Israel jets] overhead we used to rush to the bunker and hide…That was our life for months just squatting in bunkers.”

Amnesty stated: “The Government of Sri Lanka exacerbated this isolation by restricting access by outsiders to the conflict area. In September 2008, Defense Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaska issued a directive ordering all humanitarian and UN agencies to leave the Vanni and remove all equipment and vehicles.” This order also applied to journalists, opposition politicians and humanitarian organizations.

John Pilger described Sri Lanka’s isolation strategy this way:

The Sri Lankan government has learned an old lesson from, I suspect, a modern master: Israel. In order to conduct a slaughter, you ensure the pornography is unseen, illicit at best. You ban foreigners and their cameras from Tamil towns like Mulliavaikal, which was bombarded recently by the Sri Lankan army, and you lie that the 75 people killed in the hospital were blown up quite willfully by a Tamil suicide bomber.¹

From 2006-7 onward President Rajapakse was spending nearly one-quarter ($1.5 billion) of Sri Lanka’s national budget of $7.5 billion (2008 figures) on war. By January 2009, the Sri Lankan military, refortified especially by Israel, Pakistan and China, had recaptured much of the Tamil Homeland. From the end of 2008 to Sri Lanka’s military victory over LTTE, it had indiscriminately bombed Tamil civilians even in the “safe zones” where the government had told them to flee. Many thousands were killed.

After the fall of Tamil Eelam’s de facto capital, it still took the far superiorly armed and manned army four and one-half months to defeat the guerrilla army. There were few close contact battles. The LTTE fighters and civilians in the remaining Homeland area were subject to shelling from the air and by long-distance artillery. Amnesty International reported:

Eyewitness accounts of the final months of the war painted a grim picture of deprivation of food, water and medical care; fear, injury and loss of life suffered by civilians trapped by the conflict… both the LTTE and Sri Lankan government forces committed violations of international humanitarian law… The LTTE forcibly recruited children as soldiers, used civilians as human shields against the Sri Lankan army’s offensive, and attacked civilians who tried to flee. The Sri Lankan armed forces launched indiscriminate attacks with artillery on areas densely populated by civilians. Hospitals were shelled, resulting in death and injuries among patients and staff.

Sri Lanka’s military achieved victory by murdering any Tamil “in its way”, and because of the extensive military force provided to it by many capitalist and so-called socialist states. Here are the major players:

1. India has provided weaponry, radar and training to Sri Lanka’s military since 1987. It often hides what aid it gives or sells since so many of its citizens are against S.L.’s brutality against Tamils. After a period of providing little military assistance, it increased its aid at the end of 2008 when the government launched its all-out offensive. As late as April 2009, India sent three fast attack boats and a missile corvette (INS Vinash), part of $500 million in total aid. It has also turned over LTTE fugitives to S.L. India sees its traditional role as the dominant nation in South Asia being replaced by China’s fast-growing presence, which is another reason for its support to Sri Lanka’s Buddhist government despite the fact that 80% of India’s 1.2 billion people practice Hinduism with less than 1% Buddhists. On the world plan, India hip hops from one antagonist force to another. There is no clear direction.

2. The United States of America has been arming and financing Sri Lanka for most of the civil war period. The Indian Ocean is a vital waterway in which half of the world’s containerized cargo passes through. Its waters carry heavy traffic of petroleum products. The US signed a ten year Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA) with Sri Lanka on 5 March 2007 which provides, along with other things, logistics supplies and refueling facilities. The US already has Voice of America installation at Tricomalee, which can be used for surveillance. From at least the 1990s, the US has provided military training, financing and weapons sales averaging $1.5 million annually. During the cease fire, in 2002, this sum went down to $259,999 for military training only. Bush was especially glad for Sri Lanka’s terrorism, and encouraged Colombo to resume the civil war, in 2006, which his government financed with $2.9 million. The Pentagon provided counter-insurgency training, maritime radar, patrols of US warships and aircraft. At the end of Bush’s second term, the US was forced to cut back on aid given that it was bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq. That, coupled with critical public opinion, organized by the Diaspora, of state terrorism and systematic discrimination of Tamils, prompted congress to make noises about abuses of human rights by not only LTTE but also about the use of children in “paramilitary forces of the Sri Lankan government.” Nevertheless, in 2008, $1.45 million in military financing and training was granted the government out of a total of $7.4 million in total aid. The US made noises about killing a ‘humanitarian crisis’ when the Sri Lankan army was about to finish the war but it never took affirmative action to bring the war to an end. It’s howling about human rights is only a veiled threat to the Sri Lankan government, that it should not do anything prejudicial to its interests, that is, keep China at bay.

3. Israel was officially re-awarded diplomatic relations, in May 2000, after Sri Lanka had severed them, in 1970, in protest at Israel’s continued illegal expansion into Palestinian territory. Nevertheless, Israel continued to operate inside S.L. out of a special interests office set up in the US embassy. Under the table, however, Sri Lanka’s successive regimes embraced Israel’s military advisors, a special commando unit in the police, and Mossad counter-intelligence agents—who sought to drive a wedge between Muslims and Tamils. After S.L. military defeat at Elephant Pass, it appealed to Israel for military aid. Israel sent 16 of its supersonic Kfir fighter jets, some Dvora fast naval attack craft, and electronic and imagery surveillance equipment, plus advisors and technicians. Israel personnel took part in military attacks on Tamil units, and its pilots flew attack aircraft. Tigers shot down one Kfir. Just before the end of the war, Prime Minister Wickremanayake was in Israel to make bigger deals with Israeli arms supplies.

4. U.K./EU In 2005, British arms export rose by 60%, according to John Pilger (12). In 2008, £1.4 million in arms export was approved. France sent patrol boats, and other EU countries continued but reduced military aid. The EU had never been required to offer much aid given that its major allies were so much engaged.

5. Japan has long been Sri Lanka’s greatest economic donor until China overtook that position in 2008-9. Japan has sold technology and offered generous loans, but it has also outright donated millions more every year. In 1997, for instance, it granted $52 million outright but $26 in technical cooperation. In 2001, aid was at $310 million. It also paid for the government television station, Rupavahini. While Japan’s aid, sales and loans are not directed at defense, these huge sums allow the Sri Lanka governments to use more of its budget for war. This is the case as well with several other Asian countries.

6. Iran “We don’t need your money (with all those strings)”, a Sri Lanka treasury functionary purportedly told World Bank officials last year. “The international community” (US-EU governments) had begun to cut back on aid and even to ask questions about treatment of Tamil civilians, whose cries were being heard from the Diaspora. So, Sri Lanka played one power against another: India-Pakistan/China, US-China, Israel-Iran/Libya—the West-NAM. In 2008-9, Iran provided $1.9 billion in credit to build an oil refinery, in order to process S.L.’s crude oil, and it donated $450 million for a hydropower project. Iran is US’s most important inside ally with the Quisling Iraq government. And Libya has most recently been approached for a $500 million loan by Sri Lanka. Libya is with and against Iran.

7. Pakistan came into the Sri Lanka debacle, in 2008, at the encouragement of China. At the beginning of 2009, it provided $100 million in military assistance loans; it gave Chinese-origin small arms, and offered pilot training for S.L.’s new Chinese aircraft. Pakistan is also an ally of the US in its terror war “against” terror. Its governments are part of the war against Afghanistan, which has spread throughout most of Pakistan and split the population. Here have we a country allied with Cuba and ALBA et al. in NAM at the same time a partner with the world’s greatest terrorist state.

8. China entered the picture in 2005.China is the world’s no 2 oil consumer after the United States. China has stepped up efforts to secure sea lanes and transport routes that are vital for its oil supplies. In April 2007, just one month after the US’s ACSA deal with SL, China’s Poly Technologies supplied $36.5 million arms to Sri Lanka. A $150 million contract was given to China’s Huawei, which has close links with the Chinese intelligence wing MSS, to build a country-wide infrastructure for communications. In 2008, China invested five times over what it did in 2007. Its biggest investment is a vast construction project at Hambantota on the southern coast, which it will use as a re-fuelling and docking station for its navy. “Ever since Sri Lanka agreed to the plan, in March 2007, China has given it all the aid, arms and diplomatic support it needs to defeat the Tigers, without worrying about the West,” wrote The Times (London). China acts without asking questions about the treatment and conditions of workers and minorities. In April 2007, S.L. made a deal to buy Chinese ammunition and ordnance for is military. China gave it six F7 jet fighters after a Sky Tiger raid that destroyed ten military aircraft, in 2007. One Chinese fighter was soon shot down by Tigers. China has also given or sold on credit: an anti-submarine warfare vessel, gunboats and landing craft, battle tanks, anti-aircraft guns, and air surveillance radars. In June 2009, after the conclusion of the civil war, it signed an $891 million agreement for the Norochcholai Coal Power project. Chinese companies were granted an Economic Zone for 33 years. Huichen Investments Holdings Limited is to invest $28 million in next three years in the Mirigama Zone. For the first time a specific area was given to a foreign country. China is making major inroads into Sri Lanka, causing concern in the US-India Axis.

In the last few months of the war, Sri Lanka’s military used China’s weapons to systematically bombard what was left of the Tamil Eelam homeland. British media reported that 20,000 Tamil civilians were killed just in the last five days. Yet President Rajapakse claimed that “not one Tamil civilian was killed by military shelling.”

According to the pro-imperialist The Times (London), “aerial photographs, official documents, witness accounts and expert testimony” tell a story of the Sri Lankan’s “fierce barrage” of three weeks constant shelling in a five-kilometer area where 300,000 Tamil civilians were. The Times’ estimated that about 1,000 civilians were killed each day for three weeks until May 19. With most of the leadership dead, and tens of thousands civilians slaughtered, the LTTE surrendered.

One of The Times’ sources for these figures, and that responsibility lay with SL military, is the Catholic priest Amalraj, who was there until May 16. At the time of article, May 29, 2009, he was interned in the militarized Manik Farm camp along with 200,000 others.

Even the editor of the pro-imperialist Armed Forces of the UK magazine contended that it was not the Tigers who fired upon their own people but that is was the Sri Lankan government, which used imprecise air-burst and ground-impact mortars to annihilate anything alive.

The Times piece ended on this sad note: S.L “was cleared of any wrongdoing by the UN Human Rights Council after winning the backing of countries including China, Egypt, India and Cuba.”

1. John Pilger, “Distant Voices, Desperate Lives,” New Statesman, May 13, 2009.

The Tamil people in Sri Lanka had expectations that they would achieve equal rights and power with the Sinhalese once independence was won from the British colonialists. As the independence movement was winning over colonialization there was no talk of any Tamil separatism.

Even before the defeat of the Axis powers, Britain prepared to decolonize Ceylon. In 1943, the colonial secretary of state stated that a constitution would be drafted will all parties involved. A condition would be that “The Parliament of Ceylon shall not make any law rendering persons of any community or religion liable to disabilities or restrictions to which persons of other communities are not made liable …”²

Britain established the Soulbury Commission in 1944. The leading Sinhalese politician was D.S. Senanayake—a conservative, who founded, in 1946, the rightist pro-independence and pro-capitalist United National Party (UNP). Senanayake became known as the “Father of Sri Lanka.” He convinced a leading Tamil politician, G.G. Ponnamblam—who founded the All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC), in 1944—to partake in independence negotiations.

Another provision of the Soulbury Commission (Constitution) was that any bill which evoked “serious opposition by any racial or religious community and which, in the opinion of the Governor-General is likely to involve oppression or serious injustice to any community must be reserved by the Governor-General.”

The vote on the third reading of the “Free Lanka” bill was supported by all the Muslim members and by most Tamil and Sinhalese groups. “Some of the other minority members who did not want to openly support the bill took care to be absent or abstain. Finally, the debate and the vote of acceptance on the eighth and ninth of September 1945 was the most significant indication of general reconciliation among the ethnic and regional groups. Far exceeding the 3/4 majority required by the Soulbury Commission, Senanayake had 51 votes in favor, and only three votes against the adoption of the constitution. The vote was ‘in many ways a vote of confidence by all communities…and the minorities were as anxious as the majority for self-government.’”

Senanayake’s speech in proposing the motion of acceptance made reference to the minorities and said … “throughout this period the Ministers had in view one objective only, the attainment of maximum freedom. Accusations of Sinhalese domination have been bandied about. We can afford to ignore them for it must be plain to every one that what we sought was not Sinhalese domination, but Ceylonese domination. We devised a scheme that gave heavy weightage to the minorities; we deliberately protected them against discriminatory legislation. We vested important powers in the Governor-General… We decided upon an Independent Public Service Commission so as to give assurance that there should be no communalism in the Public Service. I do not normally speak as a Sinhalese, and I do not think that the Leader of this Council ought to think of himself as a Sinhalese representative, but for once I should like to speak as a Sinhalese and assert with all the force at my command that the interests of one community are the interests of all. We are one of another, what ever race or creed.”

The first national election was held August 23-September 30, 1947. 1,887, 364 people voted for 95 MP (members of parliament). There were six parties and many independents. The results were:

UNP with 39.8% (42 MPs)

LSSP 10.8% (10)

BLPI 6% (5)

ACTC 4.4% (7)

CIC 3.8% (6)

CPC 3.7% (3)

Labor 1.4% (1)

Independents 29% (16)³

“We are one of another, whatever race or creed,” swore the “Father” of the new independent State. It looked good for all ethnic and religious groups, but then the deceit became evident with the new citizenship act.

On February 4, 1948, the new government introduced the Ceylon Citizenship Bill before Parliament. The outward purpose of the bill was to provide a means of obtaining citizenship, but I think its real purpose was to discriminate against the Indian Tamils by denying them citizenship. The Ceylon Citizenship Act no. 18, August 20, 1948 denied citizenship to 11% of the population.

Although the All Ceylon Tamil Congress opposed the bill, it had joined with the UNP. This provoked half of its members to form the Federal Party, led by SJV Chelvanayakam. Next year, the Indian and Pakistani Residents Act, no.3, disenfranchised nearly all Tamils, who were originally from India. Their seven MPs were kicked out of parliament and there were no Indian Tamils in the 1952 parliament elections. It wasn’t until 1988 that the Sri Lanka government granted citizenship to stateless persons, who hadn’t applied for Indian citizenship. In 2003, 168,141 descendants of Indian Tamils were allowed citizenship.

The new government allowed Sinhalese to appropriate land on the Tamil traditional homeland in the north and east. Entire villages were driven out—ethnic cleansing—which the Sinhalese settled, aiming to break a geographic continuity of the Tamil homeland.⁴ Within time, Sinhalese settlers had taken over 30% of Tamil lands and homes—a la Israel in Palestine.

In 1956, The Sinhala Only Act became law. It mandated Sinhala as “the sole official language”, which, at that time was spoken by 70% of the population.

Supporters of the law saw it as an attempt by a community that had just gained independence to distance themselves from their colonial masters, while its opponents viewed it as an attempt by the linguistic majority to oppress and assert dominance on minorities. The Act symbolizes the post independent majority Sinhalese to assert its Sri Lanka’s identity as a nation state, and for Tamils, it became a symbol of minority oppression and a justification for them to demand a separate nation state, which resulted in decades of civil war.

Tamils protested the discriminatory law by using Gandhian tactics of non-violent sit-ins. Although stated advocates of non-violence, Buddhist monks led Sinhalese mobs against Tamils.

The Gal Oya riots… were the first ethnic riots that targeted the minority Sri Lankan Tamils… The riots took place from June 11, 1956 and occurred over the next five days. Local majority Sinhalese colonists and employees of the Gal Oya settlement board commandeered government vehicles, dynamite and weapons and massacred minority Tamils… It is estimated that over 150 people lost their lives due in the violence. Although initially inactive, the Police and the Army were eventually able to re-take control of the situation and brought the riots under control.

Tamil political leader SJV Chelvanayagam began to organize a massive Satyagraha (non-violent resistance). In order to avoid even more bloodshed, Prime Minister Solomon Bandaranayaka signed an agreement with Chelvanayagam promising to restore Tamil as the (or one of two) official language(s) in its minority areas. This infuriated many Sinhalese, especially monks, and they assaulted and sometimes killed Tamils in many areas. Buddhist monks even besieged the official residence of Bandaranayaka demanding that he abandoned the agreement, which he did. But, in 1958, the Sinhalese-led parliament, pressed by the violence and the pro-Moscow and Trotskyist Sinhalese parties, passed an amendment to the Sinhala Only Act (called “Sinhala Only, Tamil Also”) restoring Tamil as a co-official language in their areas of the North and East. Frustrated at the compromise, Sinhalese mobs murdered 200-300 Tamils, including some Sinhalese who gave Tamils refuge. Many Tamil women were raped and some Tamil boys were stripped, bound, and burned alive. This violent hatred evokes the lynching and burning alive of black people by whites in the southern USA.

Some Buddhists were angry that the Sinhalese Prime Minister Bandaranayaka had tried to compromise with Tamils. In 1959, a Buddhist monk assassinated him.

The language law had its intended effect. In 1955, the civil service had been largely made of Tamils, who had benefited more than Sinhalese from western style education provided by missionaries. This fact was used by populist Sinhalese politicians to come to power—or retain power—on the promise of providing more civil service jobs to Sinhalese by demanding that their language be the only one used in public service. By 1970, the civil service was almost entirely Sinhalese. Thousands of Tamil civil servants were forced to resign due to lack of fluency in Sinhala. In the1960s, government forms and services were virtually unavailable to Tamils.

Confrontation became the modus operandi; Sinhalese were the Zionists and Tamils the Palestinians!

It is important to stress, especially with progressive-revolutionary governments, such as the ALBA alliance in Latin America, and their supporters throughout the world, that the Tamils’ history in Sri Lanka is one of constant and widespread discrimination. They are also subjects to a policy of genocide as defined by the United Nations.⁵

Sri Lanka made world headlines in 1960 when a woman, Sirimavo RD Bandaranaike, was elected prime minister—the world’s first female leader. Being the widow of the martyr and founder of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) was an asset. She immediately brought Sri Lanka into the Non-Alignment Movement, founded in 1961. The originators—India’s Nehru, Egypt’s Nasser, Yugoslavia’s Tito and Ghana’s Nkrumah—sought support for each other’s sovereignty without aligning with either super-power bloc at that time.⁶

Nevertheless, Sri Lankan leaders of both predominantly Sinhala major parties continued to be dependent upon economic and military ties with India, the US, the UK, and Israel. Social welfare programs were carried out within a capitalist economic structure. This was a cause for radical opposition. In 1971, thousands of Sinhalese students, and Indian Tamil plantation workers, under the leadership of a new nationalistic and Marxist-oriented political party, Janatha Vimukthi Peramana (JVP), translated as Peoples Liberation Front, engaged in anti-government clashes. Fifteen thousand protestors were killed in the uprising.

Once in power, Bandaranaike’s widow did not alter the Sinhalese policy of genocide: “…an ingenious device was resorted to deprive the Tamils of the constitutional safeguards and the characteristics of the conditional polity. A coalition of three Sinhalese political parties, led by Mrs. Sirimavo R.D.Bandaranaike, called upon the people to give a mandate [in the 1970 General Elections, during her second term] for a new Constituent Assembly to scrap the 1948 dominion polity and create a new Republic of Sri Lanka. Whilst the voters in the seven Sinhalese provinces gave Mrs.Bandaranaike the mandate that she had requested, the Tamil voters in the Northern and Eastern Provinces summarily rejected her call. In the North and East, a mere 14% of the votes polled supported the call for a new constituent Assembly.”

Laws protecting rights of racial and religious minorities were abandoned and Buddhism was made the constitutional religion of Sri Lanka.

Sinhalese claimed 5000 acres in the Tamil farmland “Nochikulam” as theirs, renaming it “Nochiyagama.” Next year, 10,738 Sinhalese families settled in Trincomalee illegally.

“The sovereignty of the Tamil people (who were ethnically, geographically and linguistically separately identifiable and distinct) revived.”

With this setback, a reinvigorated ACTC joined with the Federal Party, in 1972, to form the Tamil United Front (TUF). Separatism or autonomy now became the cry for nearly all Tamils, who sought an Eelam part of Sri Lanka. Thirty Tamil militant groups emerged.

“The operative part is Thamil Eelam and it means the Tamil part of Eelam. The term Eelam is a synonym for Sri Lanka and has been in use in Tamil literature right from the Cankam Period dating as far back as 200 B.C. to circa 250 A.D.”

The second government of Sirimavo Bandaranaike enacted a discriminatory double standard law for admission grades to universities, requiring Tamil students to achieve higher grades than Sinhalese.

Throughout the 1970s, Sinhalese mobs clashed—with impunity—not only with Tamils but also Muslim Moors. In 1976, Sinhalese burned 271 houses and 44 shops, murdering a score of Muslims.

In 1976, the Tamil United Front Party changed its name to the Tamil United Liberation Front (TUFP) at the Vattukottai Conference, and adopted a demand for an independent sovereign state in traditional Tamil homeland in the north and east to be known as the “secular, socialist state of Tamil Eelam.”⁷

By 1975, Tamil militancy increased with the birth of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), led by Velupillai Prabhakaran, who considered himself a Marxist and follower of Che Guevara. The LTTE engaged in small armed clashes with the military.

The conservative UNP won a landslide victory in the July 1977 elections. But the pro-independence TULF won 6.4% of the popular vote, winning all 14 seats in the Tamil homeland area, and four more seats of the 168-member parliament. In response to Tamil’s peaceful struggle and its parliamentary victory, Sinhalese mobs, led by Buddhist monks, again destroyed many Tamil homes and shops and murdered up to 300 Tamils.

In July 1978, the UNP, led by Prime Minister Junius Richard Jayewardene, changed the constitution and renamed the country the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. An executive presidency was established, allowing the president greater powers than the prime minister, whom the president now appoints. The president is also the commander-in-chief and head of the cabinet. He can dissolve parliament and has judicial impunity.

Jayewardene became the first president and appointed Ramasinghe Premadosa (UNP) prime minister. Despite the new name, “democratic socialist republic,” the capitalist government began deregulating much of what had been government run enterprises. Private enterprise was priority.

On May 31, 1981, the TULF held a rally in Jaffna in the north. Police clashed with Tamils and two policemen were killed. For three days, Sinhalese mobs, policemen, and soldiers went on a rampage. Several Tamils were taken from their homes and killed. The TULF headquarters, a newspaper office, presses, and shops were destroyed. Worst of all was the total destruction of the Jaffna library and its 97,000 volumes of books and irreplaceable historical manuscripts, some made of palm leaves. It is now well known that the fire that destroyed this unique institution of the Tamils in their homeland was masterminded by a handful of ministers of the Sinhala Government in Colombo, who were present in Jaffna the night of the fire.

“The national newspapers did not carry information about the incident and in subsequent parliamentary debates some majority Sinhalese members reminded minority Tamil politicians that if Tamils were unhappy in Sri Lanka, they should leave for their homeland in India. This is a direct quotation from United National Party member MP WJM Lokubandara:

“If there is discrimination in this land which is not their (Tamil) homeland, then why try to stay here? Why not go back home (India) where there would be no discrimination?”

“Twenty years later, the mayor of Jaffna, Nadarajah Raviraj, still grieved at the recollection of the flames he saw as a University student. He was later killed by unknown gunmen in the capital Colombo, in 2006.”

Civil War and LTTE

By summer 1983, the then small guerrilla army of LTTE was well settled in most northern and eastern areas. Their first major assault against the state’s military took place at Jaffna peninsula, July 24. LTTE ambushed a convoy of soldiers passing through land mines and killed 15.

This could have been in response to many random attacks upon Tamils in various areas. One example is in Trincomalee where, on 10 April 1983, a young Tamil died in police custody after having been held without charge for two weeks. At the judicial inquest into his death, on May 31, the Jaffna Magistrate returned a verdict of homicide. Three days later, the government changed the rules permitting the police to bury or cremate bodies without a post mortem or an inquest.

Amnesty International cabled President Jayawardene expressing concern that such a regulation could give rise to grave human rights violations and appealed to him to rescind it. But he did not. On the contrary, on June 3, 1983, the day that the new Emergency Regulation was brought into effect, the attacks on the Tamils in Trincomalee commenced in earnest.

R. Sampanthan, M.P. for Trincomalee, described that mobs of Sinhalese went from village to village setting fire to Tamil houses and shops. A particular modus operandi was observed. Heavily armed service personnel would enter a Tamil area and carry out a search alleging that explosions and dangerous weapons were hidden in that area. Invariably nothing would be recovered other than implements that would normally be available in any house. Sometimes Tamil youths would be arrested on “suspicion” and taken for questioning. After a month of many pogrom raids, the LTTE struck the army convoy.

That night and for weeks Sinhalese rampaged against Tamils, especially in the Colombo area where some Tamils youths were stripped naked and burned alive in petrol. Black July ended with between 2000 and 3000 dead Tamils, among them 53 prisoners, including key political leaders, who were murdered by Sinhalese prisoners at Welikadai. One political prisoner, Kuttimani, had his eyes gouged out and stomped upon under a soldier’s boots.

One hundred thousand Tamils were rendered homeless and that many and more fled to India.

Even non-violent advocates of separatism or independence, such as the TULF, were pushed out of the democratic process. The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, enacted in August 1983, classified all separatist movements as unconstitutional. That meant that all its members of parliament—16 then—lost their seats. Thousands of Tamil youth joined militant armed groups, especially the LTTE, which became the most disciplined and well organized.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the LTTE established a de facto state, called Tamil Eelam, and managed a government, which provided a judicial court system, a police force, and social assistance in health and education and for the poorest. LTTE ran a bank, a radio station (Voice of Tigers), even a television station. Guerrilla leaders helped organize small cooperative farming units based on traditional methods. The LTTE dismantled the caste system and officially stopped discrimination against women. The LTTE organized a civilian administration under its command. There was order and peace in these areas, as long as everyone obeyed and when the Sri Lanka army did not bomb.

In the 1980s, there was much discontent in other parts of Sri Lanka. Radical Sinhalese youths, such as the JVP, demanded going further towards socialism. In 1987, JVP engaged in another armed uprising. But after 1989, it entered into parliamentary politics. It participated in the 1994 parliamentary general election and joined conservative and liberal party coalitions in opposing equal rights with Tamils.

Ranasinghe Premadasa was prime minister from February 1978 to January 1, 1989, under President Jayewardene, and then he became president until his assassination on Mayday 1993. Many Sinhalese elitists thought he was too common to be their leader and too compromising with Tamils. Controversial policies under his terms included the matter of language, ethnic cleansing, and the role of India in internal affairs. The first controversy was the constitutional amendment allowing “equality” of languages in the Tamil areas: “National languages shall be Sinhala and Tamil,” although, “The official language of Sri Lanka shall be Sinhala. Tamil shall also be an official language. English shall be a link language.”

This compromise spoke in double tongues. Why not just make Sinhala and Tamil equally official, as India has done with a score of languages?

Alienated Tamils

Even a U.S. Library of Congress study characterized Tamils as alienated. In 1988, it published, SriLanka: a Country Study. In the chapter entitled, “Tamil Alienation,” the authors wrote:

Moderate as well as militant Sri Lankan Tamils have regarded the policies of successive Sinhalese governments in Colombo with suspicion and resentment since at least the mid-1950s, when the “Sinhala Only” language policy was adopted…

Several issues provided the focus for Sri Lankan Tamil alienation and widespread support, particularly within the younger generation, for extremist movements…Sinhalese still remained the higher-status “official language,” and inductees into the civil service were expected to acquire proficiency in it. Other areas of disagreement concerned preference given to Sinhalese applicants for university admissions and public employment, and allegations of government encouragement of Sinhalese settlement in Tamil-majority areas.

“Government-sponsored settlement of Sinhalese in the northern or eastern parts of the island, traditionally considered to be Tamil regions, has been perhaps the most immediate cause of inter-communal violence. There was, for example, an official plan in the mid-1980s to settle 30,000 Sinhalese in the dry zone of Northern Province, giving each settler land and funds to build a house and each community armed protection in the form of rifles and machine guns. Tamil spokesmen accused the government of promoting a new form of ‘colonialism’,” but the Jayewardene government asserted that no part of the island could legitimately be considered an ethnic homeland and thus closed to settlement from outside. Settlement schemes were popular with the poorer and less fortunate classes of Sinhalese.”

Che Guevara made no bones about the significance of alienation: “…the ultimate and most important revolutionary aspiration (is) to see man liberated from his alienation.”⁸

India’s Vacillating Role

The role of India in Sri Lanka’s civil war was a major problem. India’s Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, son of assassinated Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, first supported the LTTE. His air force even dropped 25 tons of aid in their territory in Jaffna (Operation Poomalai). A month following this, the Indo-Sri Lanka Peace Accord was signed between Gandhi and the reluctant Prime Minister Ranasinghe Presmadasa, under pressure from his president, JR Jayewardene. The July 29, 1987 accord was expected to resolve the ongoing civil war. Colombo agreed to devolution of power to the Tamil provinces, and its military was to withdraw in exchange for the Tamil rebels’ disarmament. The LTTE had not been made party to the talks but reluctantly agreed to surrender arms to the Indian Peace Keeping Force. Within a few months, however, both sides flared into an active confrontation. Indian soldiers died in far greater numbers than Tamil rebels: 1,500 killed and 4,500 wounded.

In January 1989, Premadasa was elected President on a popular platform promising that the Indian Peace Keeping Force would leave within three months. The police action was unpopular in India as well, especially with some 50 million Tamil Nadu people. Gandhi refused to withdraw India’s troops, however, believing that the only way to end the civil war was to politically force Premadasa and to militarily force the LTTE to accept the accord. But, in December 1989, Vishwanath Pratap Singh was elected India’s Prime Minister and completed the pullout.

On May 21, 1991, in an act of revenge over India’s militarist actions, a female LTTE member blew up Rajiv Gandhi in a suicide bomb attack. In 1992, India became the first government, even before Sri Lanka, to declare the LTTE a terrorist group.

President Premadasa resumed the civil war, which became stalemated. Many forces were angry with him, including a rival Sinhalese leader Lalith Athulathmudali, who sought an impeachment motion against Premadasa, in 1991. Lalith was an adamant supporter of Zionism.

When Athulathmudali, a pro-Israeli power broker, challenged Premadasa two years ago with an impeachment motion in the parliament, Premadasa openly accused Mossad, the intelligence agency of Israel, of trying to topple him. In his address to the Sri Lankan parliament, Premadasa said,

“…I had Israeli interests section removed. In such a context there is nothing to be surprised about the Mossad rising up against me. Please remember that there are among us traitors who have gone to Israeli universities and lectured there and earned dirty money…”

cited Sachi Sri Kantha, quoting the prime minister in “The Puzzles in President Premadasa’s Assassination Revisited.”

In April 1993, Athulathmudali was murdered. Eight days later, on Mayday, Premadasa was murdered. The LTTE did not claim responsibility for these assassinations but were so blamed by Sinhalese and the mass media.

“When Athulathmudali was assassinated last April, the members of his party immediately accused Premadasa for ordering the killing. The murder of Premadasa could have been a return hit planned and executed by the Mossad which had lost its major card in Sri Lankan politics.”

The second Eelam war lasted from 1989 until November 1994 when the People’s Alliance (led by SLFP) candidate, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, won the presidency. But peace negotiations broke down and the war continued from 1995 until the end of 2001 when ceasefire negotiations made progress. But not before the LTTE proved to the Sri Lanka government and military, with 230,000 well armed troops, that it was its equal. With somewhere around 5000 guerrillas—along with a small Sea Tigers boat unit, which made some pirate hits for funding, and even a few light civilian aircraft, the Sky Tigers, which sometimes made damaging raids against the Air Force—the LTTE won many military victories.

The Sri Lankan military often bombed civilian Tamils in the LTTE-controlled zones. It claimed that they were legitimate “collateral damage” given that the guerrillas allegedly forced them to remain against their will. The civilian hostage charge was widely reported as truth by the west and its mass media, as was the allegation that the LTTE forces children into armed combat.

On January 31, 1996, the LTTE stunned the nation when it bombed the Central Bank in Colombo, which managed most financial business accounts. One suicide bomber with 200 kilos of explosions drove through the main gate and exploded, wiping out many bank floors and several other buildings. Behind him came a vehicle with two cadres firing rifles and launchers. They escaped but were later captured. Material damage was tremendous but more so was the loss of 53 lives and injuries to 1,400 people, most of them not military targets.

On July 24, 1996, LTTE forces bombed a commuter train killing 70 Sinhalese civilians. By the end of the 1990s, both sides had killed tens of thousands of people. Civilians were targeted by both sides. The Tigers claimed that civilians were targeted only when associated with military installations. But some attacks, such as the train, were unjustifiable. Furthermore, the LTTE has often murdered other Tamils who also seek autonomy but were not part of the LTTE or had made public critiques. It has, for example, killed several leaders of the TULF.

On April 22, 2000 LTTE forces surprisingly overran Sri Lanka’s Elephant Pass military base on Jaffna. Over 1,000 troops were killed and huge quantities of arms and ammunition were taken.

On July 24, 2001, the LTTE again stunned the nation and the world when it attacked the only international airport and the nearby military base.

Around 3:30 am on July 24, 14 members of the LTTE Black Tiger suicide squad infiltrated Katunayake air base… After destroying electricity transformers to plunge the base in darkness they cut through the barbed wire surrounding the base to begin their assault. Using rocket propelled grenades, anti-tank weapons and assault rifles, the militants attacked the air force planes. They were not able to attack the aircraft in the hangars but did destroy eight military aircraft on the tarmac: three Nanchange K-8 trainer aircraft, one Mil Mi-17 helicopter, one Mil Mi-24 helicopter, two LAI Kfir fighter jets, and a Mig-27. Five K-8s and one MiG-27 were also damaged. A total of 26 aircraft were either damaged or destroyed in the attack.

Eight Tigers and three air force officers died in the battle at the air base. The six remaining LTTE members then crossed the runway to nearby Bandaranaike Airport. Using their weapons, they began blowing up any civilian aircraft they could find, which were all empty. One Airbus340 was destroyed by an explosive charge; an A330 was destroyed by a rocket fired from the control tower. In addition, an A320-200 and an A340-300 were damaged in the assault.”

All 14 guerrillas were killed, along with six Sri Lankan air force personnel and one soldier killed by friendly fire; 12 soldiers were injured, along with three Sri Lankan civilians and a Russian engineer… The cost of replacing the civilian aircraft was estimated at $350 million USD. The attack caused a slowdown in the economy of Sri Lanka, to about -1.4%. Tourism also plummeted, dropping 15.5% at the end of the year.

Cease Fire

During two decades of civil war, the LTTE had several times offered a ceasefire on the condition of negotiations to establish peace and ethnic equality. With this military victory, the guerrilla army offered a unilateral ceasefire. Some national voices and many international ones were also pressing for a ceasefire. Norway took concrete steps, but it was this spectacular military victory and the loss to the economy that forced the government to the bargaining table.

The formal Ceasefire Agreement (CFA) was signed on February 22, 2002. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe and LTTE leader Velupillai Pirabakaran signed the agreement, alongside mediator Jan Petersen representing Norway’s foreign ministry.

Provisions provided for each side holding their ground positions. Neither side was to engage in any offensive military operation or move munitions into the area controlled by the other side.

The LTTE proposed an Interim Self-Government Authority (ISGA) to administer the Tamil homeland, pending final agreement and elections. The ceasefire was monitored by the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission. It was staffed by designees from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland. The US, UK and other EU countries had observers. Headquarters were established in Colombo, and there were 60 monitors in six district teams and two naval ones. The SLMM monitored violations and mediated between the two parties but could not enforce sanctions. Many Sinhalese considered the Monitoring Mission, especially Norway, of being partial to the Tigers.

During the ceasefire, progress was made in agricultural development and general infrastructure in the Tamil Homeland. Many foreigners were invited to observe and participate in building Tamil Eelam. Impressive first-hand accounts have been written about the progress in many areas: administrative, economic and a social welfare network. While voices friendly to this process praised the advances made, many also questioned the lack of civilian input in the decision-making process.

The LTTE did not emphasize an international political solidarity movement. It did appeal for economic donations, which poured to it, especially from Tamils in the Diaspora. The LTTE stopped speaking of Marxism or building a socialist independent state. It emphasized winning militarily—if Sri Lanka continued preventing an autonomous Tamil homeland—and constructing a social welfare state with cooperative and private enterprises. The Tigers became so respectable they could openly purchase weaponry from some countries not directly under the thumb of US-EU-Israel or their partial antagonists: China, Iran and Pakistan. A May 29, 2009 Times Online piece quotes the editor of Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Centre, saying that the LTTE used 11 merchant ships to deliver weapons, many of which they got from Bulgaria, Ukraine, Cyprus, Thailand and Croatia. Even the World Bank recognized the LTTE as an unofficial State, according to its representative in Sri Lanka, Peter Harrold, in 2005.

The LTTE was even building a Tamil University where Tamils in the Diaspora would have taught. I spoke with one of them, a man who had earned a doctorate degree in environmental science and taught in European universities. He frequently visited the homeland he had left three decades previously. He hoped that he would return and teach once the university would be opened.

An activist in independence forces using peaceful methods, he wished to remain anonymous. His impressions were that the Tigers were the dominating factor in civilian administration but that as long as no one objected one felt safe in the Homeland areas whenever Colombo’s armed forces were not bombing. He was critical that the LTTE armed forces had resorted to terrorist methods in their history, such as assassinating political critics. The professor, however, did not think the LTTE forced children into combat or used civilians as human shields, generally.

“Tigers were good people, intelligent and sensitive to people and nature. But contradictions did exist. They were a strange animal.”

Cease Fire Ends

On December 26, 2004, the greatest earthquake-tsunami ever recorded (9.3) hit Southeast Asia. Eleven countries were deeply affected: 230,000 were killed or missing. Sri Lanka was one of the worst disasters. About 40,000 people were killed or missing; 1.5 million were displaced from their homes. International aid poured in but did not arrive in the North and East due to Sinhalese political party opposition. The LTTE organized all the aid it could muster for hundreds of thousands in the Tamil homeland. Foreign volunteers and emergency relief organizations praised the LTTE for its effective and caring work. There are many accounts of this.

Mahinda Rajapakse was appointed prime minister April 6, 2004, and then elected President on November 19, 2005 with just 50.3% of the vote. He was the pro-war candidate of a new coalition, the United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA). Tamil political parties and many foreign relief groups accused Rajapakse of diverting Tsunami relief funds designated for their homeland. In this complex reality, those parties most adamant about refusing aid to suffering Tamils and who demanded an end to the ceasefire with the objective of launching an all-out war were those claiming to be either hard-core Marxist-Communist-Trotskyists or self-proclaimed non-violent Buddhists.

“United People’s Freedom Alliance [is] undoubtedly the broadest coalition of progressive forces in the country. This coalition, which came into being in 2004 upon a platform of new liberal socio economic program and a resolve to defeat separatist terrorism, has since mobilized people around a social democratic agenda.”

This coalition is not just made up of alleged “progressives” but of “social” capitalists and self-styled “democratic socialists.” At the start, the coalition parties were: Sri Lanka Freedom Party, Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, Sri Lanka Mahajana Pakshaya, Muslim National Unity Alliance, Mahajana Eksath Peramuna, Democratic United National Front, and Desha Vimukthi Janatha Party.

The Communist Party of Sri Lanka and the Lanka Sama Samaja Party signed a memorandum of understanding with the SLFP so their candidates would take part in parliamentary elections in the new coalition. They also joined the UPFA. On April 2, 2004, the alliance won 45.6% of the popular vote and took 105 out of 225 seats.

A Buddhist political party, the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU), was founded in February 2004 and participated in the 2004 parliamentary elections, winning 6% of the vote for nine seats. In 2007, it formally joined the hodge-podge UPFA coalition government and was given a ministry post.

On April 3, 2008, JHU’s leader gave his reasons for warring against Tamils to the United States government financed Voice of America radio station.

Athurliye Rathana, a Buddhist monk who heads the Jathika Hela Urumaya party in Sri Lanka’s parliament, wants to end the suffering by putting a quick end to the war. Speaking with VOA at a seaside hotel in this former tourist haven, Rathana says he supports the government’s latest military offensive to quash the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

“Anytime a militant group is harmful to peaceful people, then government should have the right to exercise constitutional law and order,” Rathana said. “And, LTTE is unlawful and so, under our constitutional law, anyone cannot exercise militancy. But [with] the LTTE separatist movement, the government has some duty to control their military activities. I say only one thing, ‘Please do your duty.’”

For comments like that, the Sri Lankan media has branded Rathana the “war monk,”… his sentiments are common in Sri Lanka’s majority ethnic Sinhala community.

Rathana is a celebrated figure in this predominantly Buddhist nation, where monks are cherished for their spiritual guidance. The pro-war activism of Rathana and others has spurred as many as 30,000 Sinhalese young men to join the army in the past few months.

The UPFA alliance of apparently conflicting ideologies and economic policies is so strange that one can easily be confused about who is who and why their politics are such that they are. After a month’s research, having begun as a total novice to this region, I am unclear about why various political forces take the position they do not only about the Tigers but about the entire Tamil ethnic group. For many Sinhalese, an engrained racism is clearly a major motivation. But how can one explain that a Tamil group, Eelam People’s Democratic Party, also takes part in this coalition of Sinhalese racists? The EPDP is a paramilitary group fighting against the LTTE alongside the government. It even has one member in parliament. EPDP also assassinates civilians, including BBC reporter Nimalarajan Mylvaganam.

The Cease Fire Agreement was a thorn in the side of the new ruling coalition. Although the government claimed that the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission favored the Tiger guerrillas, its monitors had lodged 3006 violations committed by the LTTE and only 133 by the government, as of June 30, 2005. From May 2006 onward to its termination in January 2008, the Monitoring Mission was hampered by worsening hostilities, especially following a Sea Tiger boat attack on a navy convoy, May 11, 2006.

The European Union then placed the Tigers on its terrorist list, while appearing to be even-handed by calling upon the Sri Lankan government to end its “culture of impunity” and to “curb violence” in its areas of control.

Sweden, Finland and Denmark, as members of EU, also considered the Tigers to be terrorists, and the LTTE objected to their membership on the Monitoring Mission. They withdrew leaving only Norway and Iceland with 20 monitors. The reduced Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission disbanded in 2008. The path for a full war was clear.

1. John Pilger, “Distant Voices, Desperate Lives,” New Statesman, May 13, 2009.
2. See Article 29 of Soulbury Commission.
3. LSSP=Ceylon Equal Society Party comprised of Sinhalese Trotskyists; BLPI=Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India also Trotskyists; CIC=Ceylon Indian Congress, which soon changed its name to Ceylon Workers Congress, represented the Indian Tamils of the Estates Workers Trade Union; CPC, the Communist Party of Ceylon, with a pro-Moscow line; Labour was fashioned after Clement Attlee-led British Labour party. The Marxist parties later colluded with capitalist Sinhalese parties in opposing equality with Tamils. The CPC is now the Communist Party of Sri Lanka, which is part of the United People’s Freedom Alliance that includes the Sri Lanka Freedom Party-led government of Mahinda Rajapaksa.
4. “The Unspeakable Truth,” British Tamil Forum, 2008, p.8.
5. See part 1, “Justice for Sri Lanka Tamils.”
6. In 1976, Colombo was the summit site. In 1979, the Havana Declaration ensured “the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries” in their struggle against “imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism and racism.” In 2006, there were 118 member nations, representing 55% of the world’s population. Many of these nations have been at war with one another, and many have aligned with one or other of the previous super-powers.
7. My reading of Tamil history shows many discrepancies in dates and events. Different writings on the LTTE contend it was created at different times, either in 1972, 1975 or 1976.
8. Che Guevara, Socialism and man, Marcha, Uruguay, March 12, 1965.

Sri Lanka’s first aborigines with continuous lineage are the Tamil people. It is not precisely known when they came to the island, but perhaps as many as 5000 years ago. Archaeologists date the first humans in Sri Lanka to some 34,000 years. Scientists call them Balangoda people, the name of the location where artifacts were found. These hunting-gathering cave dwellers have no current lineage.

Tamils were also known as proto-Elamites or Ela. These people in Sri Lanka call themselves Eelam Tamils, meaning “earthly people”. Tamils speak a Dravidian language, which has no ties to other language families. It was, perhaps, associated with Scythians and Urals. The Dravidian language and Tamils originated, perhaps, from Sumer and Ur: the “cradle of the first civilization”, now Iran. The Sumer and Tamils formed the first language of proto-grams on clay tablets. Tamil inscriptions and literature are at least 2500 years old. Today, 100 to 200 million people speak Tamil.¹

The Christian Bible refers to Elam as “maritime nations in various lands, each with a separate language”. (Genesis 10) In the myth of Noah’s Ark, Elam was thought to be a descendant of one of Noah’s three sons on the ark. (Genesis 5-9) Tamils were the first to use the wheel for transportation. They traveled to India and the island Sri Lanka, which had been connected to India. The first known manuscripts in India were written in Tamil. Other Tamil inscriptions have been found in Egypt and Thailand.

About 2500 years ago, the first Sinhalese came to Sri Lanka from India. This was hundreds of years after Tamils were settled in the kingdom in the north at Jaffna (Yazhpanam). Sinhalese is, perhaps, a term originating from King Vijayan, who was expelled from the kingdom of Sinhapura in India and arrived in Sri Lanka 543 BC. He and his people engaged in combat with the Tamil aborigines. They established the Kandi and Kottai kingdoms in the central and southern areas.

The Sinhalese are among many ethnic groups who speak an Indo-Aryan language, Pali, believed to have developed in Sindh, Gujarat and Bengal areas about 3000 years ago. They early became practitioners of Buddhism, an off-shot of Hinduism, which is the religion that most Tamils adopted. Buddhism was created by the prince, Siddhartha Gautama, in the 6th century BC. Most Sinhalese adopted Buddhism but some were converted to Christianity, which was first introduced by traders from Syria, in the 1st or 2nd century after Christ.

The Sinhalese and Tamils have distinct ethnic backgrounds, languages and religions. The vast majority of both peoples has always lived in separate regions of Sri Lanka and they have often been at war. The Sinhalese adopted the chauvinistic attitude that their language and religion were the only true ones and they must reign throughout Sri Lanka. All other religions were alien. This notion seems to have originated, or been fortified, by the historical poem Mahavamsa (“Great Chronicle”) written in Pali by the Buddhist monk Mahatera Mahanama. It covers nearly one thousand years of Sinhalese kingdom history in Sri Lanka.

Sinhalese maintain that Sri Lanka must be a Buddhist nation because, they claim, it has been so throughout history—although they count the beginning of national history with Mahanama’s account of the first Sinhalese kingdom of Vijaya, in 543 BC. The fact that Tamil Eelams had kingdoms in Sri Lanka for many hundreds of years is ignored.

When the first Europeans, Portuguese traders, landed in Sri Lanka, in 1505, they encountered three native kingdoms: two Sinhalese kingdoms at Kottai and Kandi, and the Tamils in Jaffna peninsula. Although the Portuguese were traders, they brought fire power and eventually seized power militarily from the Kottai kingdom. Despite their superior weaponry, it took them decades to defeat the kingdoms at Jaffna and Kandi, yet resistance remained throughout Portuguese occupation. The Portuguese named the island Ceilão, which the English later transliterated as Ceylon.

In 1658, Dutch invaders arrived. The Dutch United East India Company sided with the Kandi resistance to defeat the Portuguese. But when the natives realized the Dutch sought total control, the Kandians organized guerilla warfare. In 1766, the Dutch took sovereignty over the entire coastline but not the entire island where some Tamils and Sinhalese remained independent.

In 1795, the British landed and kicked out the Dutch within a year. They realized there were two separate nations of natives. In June 1796, the British Colonial Secretary, Sir Hugh Cleghorn wrote to his government:

“Two different nations, from a very ancient period, have divided between them the possession of the Island: the Sinhalese inhabiting the interior in its southern and western parts from the river Wallouwe to Chilaw, and the Malabars (Tamils) who possess the northern and eastern districts. These two nations differ entirely in their religion, language and manners.”

It took the Brits a generation to defeat resisting natives. In 1811, they defeated Bandara Vanniyan and his guerrilla resisters in the Tamil Vanni territory. In 1815, the British finally captured the last of the Kandyan kingdom.

The European invaders were only interested in the riches they could steal. They converted the peasant based agricultural economy into an export one. The island was rich in cinnamon and other spices, coconuts and graphite. English colonialists converted much of the land into tea, coffee and rubber plantations.

Religion was used by the colonialists to dominate and pacify the natives. The Portuguese spread Catholicism in an organized manner. Some Tamils and some Sinhalese converted or were forced to convert. Both the Dutch and English continued the process with their Protestant missionaries, yet most natives held onto their beliefs in either Buddhism or Hinduism. Islamism was also introduced by Arab traders.

“Sri Lanka as British-ruled Ceylon was subjected to a classic divide-and-rule,” wrote John Pilger.

The English had to have their tea so they created tea plantations in the mountainous regions, especially in the center of the country where Sinhalese lived. But Sinhalese would not work them so the Brits “brought Tamils from India as virtual slave labor while building an educated Tamil middle-class to run the colony,” continued Pilger.² Only a few indigenous Tamils, however, ran anything, but some educated ones took the opportunity to sit on top of the bottom castes.

A hierarchy of “races”, classes and castes was perpetrated among native ethnic groups and new arrivals. In the mid-1800s, English and German scholars adopted an ideology of superiority first based on language and then on race. The English viewed Sinhalese as cousins in the large Aryan family. Brits (and Germans) were the “superior” white Aryans; the Sinhalese lesser Indo-Aryans, and Tamils were the colonized proletariat, the “black inferior race.” This fit in nicely with the Sinhalese elite notion of superiority, based on their precious book of mythology, Mahavamsa. In the 1870s, a German scholar, Max Muller, writing about language origins, especially Indo-Aryan, first coined the term “Aryan race”—something he later regretted.³

Europeans took it for granted that Greek and Latin were superior languages, and they saw affinities with Sanskrit, from which Sinhalese is derived. Given this identity, it was easier for the colonialists to drive a wedge deeper between the indigenous peoples, and all the more so by allowing Sinhalese to own land without having to work the British tea and rubber plantations in the center of the country. The Brits left the aboriginal Tamils stay in their homeland in the north and east, but brought between 800,000 and 1.5 million Tamils from India to work the fields; nearly one-fourth died in route. It is estimated that 70,000 Tamil Nadu died on route in the 1840s. Their story parallels that of Africans forced into slavery and brought to the Americas.

Ironically, it was protestant missionaries who contributed greatly to the development of political awareness among Tamils in the north and east, and led to a revival of the Hindu faith as a reaction against Christian domination. We find many examples of this in modern history, such as the increasing interest among Arabs in practicing strict Islamic customs, including separate gender rules, as a reaction to the invasions and occupations of Western imperialism in the Middle-East. Something similar is occurring in Palestine in response to the apartheid enforced by Zionist Jews.

Led by revivalist Arumuga Navalar in the mid-1800s, Tamils in the north and east built their own schools, temples, associations and presses. Literacy was used to spread Hinduism and its principles. Tamils published their own literature and newspapers to counter the ideology-religion of the missionaries. Tamils thought confidently of themselves as a community, thus lending to the legitimacy of their later assertion of the necessity to be treated equally with the Sinhalese or be granted—or take—their own autonomy as Eelam Tamils.

For some of the time that Britain ruled the island different colonial governors recognized equality of the native peoples, yet played one against the other. In 1833, the British mandated the administrative unification of the country while incorporating the different native administrative structures that existed earlier. The new legislative council was composed of three Europeans and one representative from the Sinhalese, the Ceylon Tamils and the Burghers—a Euro-Asian minority, Creole descendants of European colonialists who spoke a mixture of Indo-Portuguese. They had been converted to Protestantism.

Tamil laborers brought from India had no say nor did the few Arab Muslims. Racist Sinhalese massacred many in 1915. In 1930, another hard-working minority, Malayali plantation workers, were attacked by Sinhalese and most fled back to Kerala.

In 1921, the colonialists altered the legislative council so that Sinhalese acquired 13 seats to three for the Tamils. From here on out, Tamils developed a communal consciousness as a minority. In 1931, the Brits changed the rules again by incorporating the notion of universal franchise—one man one vote including for castes. Most Sinhalese opposed this progressive measure, seeking to maintain classes and castes while agreeing to part of the rule allowing them, as the majority, to have a decisive say over the minority Tamils. The issue of representative power-sharing, and not the structure of government, was used by nationalists of both communities to create an escalating inter-ethnic rivalry, which has been the dominant trend since.

Britain’s vacillating ruling strategy throughout their 150 year domination led to sporadic episodes of violence between Sinhalese and Tamils, often expressed as religious conflicts between Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and Muslims. More often than not, it was Buddhists who first attacked other ethnic peoples who held other faiths. The Brits often held police on the sidelines.

In the 1930s, and especially during World War II, Sinhalese and Tamils spoke out for independence. Various left-wing parties and coalitions arose, and some conservative groupings as well. Many natives hoped for a German victory over the hated English colonialists.

Tamils struggled to have their language placed on equal terms with Sinhalese, and replace English as the official language. Some Sinhalese leaders agreed but many did not. In 1939, a Tamil leader, G.G. Ponnambalam, spoke against the common Sinhalese notion, taken from the Mahavamsa, that their language should be the only official language and Buddhism the only official religion. Angry at the speech, Sinhalese mobs bashed and killed many Tamils. This time the British stopped the riots, but the roots to the upcoming 26-year long civil war had been laid.

Once WW II ended, the British Empire realized it had to give in to so many native peoples struggling for sovereignty. India won dominion status in 1947, a slight reform until full independence in 1950. The civil disobedience movement led by Mahatma Gandhi had succeeded yet he was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist on January 30, 1948. Gandhi sought unity among all Indians, but most Muslims wanted their own State after colonialism. Many Muslims were killed in riots; many lost their homes. Gandhi believed it morally correct for India to compensate them with finances. Many Hindu nationalists opposed this, and it led to his murder.

Great numbers of Hindus in India discriminated against non-Hindus just as Buddhist Sinhalese discriminate against Hindus and Muslims. The percentage of Tamils in Sri Lanka has been reduced from 30% to 12.6%. Tens of thousands have been murdered before and during the recent war, and as many as one million have fled the country, part of a massive Diaspora, like the Jews.⁴

1. This condensed history is gleaned from many sources: author Maravanpulavu K. Sachithananthan; Latin American Friendship Association, Tamilnadu, India; Wikipedia: many articles about Tamil Eelam, Sri Lanka and their histories, religions and languages; Tamilnation.org and many other sections in this comprehensive Tamil self-determination website. I am uncertain about the exactitude of origins, who came first, specific dates, or how to determine linguistic lineages. The record is unclear. But what is clear is that Sinhalese have judged and treated Tamils as inferior beings.
2. John Pilger, “Distant Voices, Desperate Lives,” New Statesman, May 13, 2009.
3. See chapter 13. “Understanding the Aryan Theory,” by Marisa Angell, a Usamerican Jew. The chapter is part of Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka, edited by Mithran Tiruchelvam and Dattathreya C.S., published by International Center for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 1998.
4. Current population statistics of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka—so named since 1978—show a population of 21 million people. 74% (15 million) Sinhalese; 12.6% (2.5 million) Tamil; 7.4% (1.5 million) Moors; 5.2% (1 million) Indian Tamil. 93% of Sinhalese are Buddhists, and the remainder Christian. 60% Tamils are Hindus, 28% are Muslim and 12% Christian.

Those who are exploited are our compatriots all over the world; and the exploiters all over the world are our enemies… Our country is really the whole world, and all the revolutionaries of the world are our brothers.
– President Fidel Castro.¹

The revolutionary [is] the ideological motor force of the revolution…if he forgets his proletarian internationalism, the revolution which he leads will cease to be an inspiring force and he will sink into a comfortable lethargy, which imperialism, our irreconcilable enemy, will utilize well. Proletarian internationalism is a duty, but it is also a revolutionary necessity. So we educate our people.
– Che Guevara²

I think that the governments of Cuba, Bolivia, and Nicaragua let down the entire Tamil population in the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, as well as “proletarian internationalism” and the “exploited”, by extending unconditional support to Sri Lanka’s racist government.

Cuba did so—along with the Bolivian and Nicaraguan governments and members of ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America)—on May 27, 2009 when signing a UN Human Rights Council (HRC) resolution praising the government of Sri Lanka for “the promotion and protection of human rights”, while only condemning for terrorism the Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which fought the government in a civil war since 1983 until their defeat on May 19, 2009.

During the last year of war, the Sri Lankan government illegally and brutally interned nearly half-a-million Tamil civilians; 280,000 of these civilians were entrapped in several “welfare centers” upon the LTTE’s surrender. Half-a-year later, only a few thousand have been released. Their conditions are the opposite of “promotion and protection of human rights”. Hundreds have died and are dying for lack of food, water, basic health care.

Since advocating for and signing the unbalanced HRC resolution, I have found no text or evidence that these progressive-revolutionary-socialist governments of ALBA have criticized Sri Lanka for routinely practicing brutality and neglecting basic life necessities of these illegally interned people. The conduct of Sinhalese-led governments towards Tamils ever since Sri Lanka’s independence from Great Britain, in 1947-8, has always been one of mistreatment and inequality, even genocide.

While ALBA leader Venezuela is not a member of that council, President Hugo Chavez followed suit by applauding Sri Lanka’s victory.³ I hope that these revolutionary leaders will undo that damage by coming to the aid of the interned and all 2.5 million Tamil survivors of this horrible carnage and condemning Sri Lanka for its beastly and racist conduct. Tamils national rights must also be recognized, especially by governments representing other indigenous and once enslaved peoples.

In this first of a five-part series, I begin to lay the case that Sri Lanka’s governments practice genocide. I will also speculate about why the four ALBA countries involved in this matter could have decided to ignore this reality, why they disallowed an investigation into the assertion, and why they support such a cruel, chauvinistic regime. In the forthcoming parts, I will sketch the history of the Sinhalese and Tamils; outline the right and necessity for Tamil nationhood; delineate their struggles for equal rights; and show the geo-political power game being played out between the west and its’ sometimes antagonistic counterpart regimes in China and Iran; and conclude with the present state of affairs for Tamils.

Human Rights Council Resolution S-11/1: Assistance to Sri Lanka in the promotion and protection of human rights

Upon the end of the war, 17 countries on the 47-member Human Rights Council called for an extraordinary session about the Sri Lankan situation. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, spoke for an “independent and credible international investigation” into the reports of violations of human rights and international humanitarian law on both sides of the civil war.

“For its part, the Government reportedly used heavy artillery on the densely populated conflict zone, despite assurances that it would take precautions to protect civilians”… and the “reported shelling of a hospital clinic on several occasions”…”

“These people are in desperate need of food, water, medical help and other forms of basic assistance… there have already been outbreaks of contagious diseases.”

“The images of terrified and emaciated women, men and children fleeing the battle zone… must spur us into action.”

Pillay’s professional, compassionate and balanced proposal was not tabled or even discussed. Instead 17 members—mostly EU countries and Canada, but also Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico and Chile—proposed only that an investigation into these charges of human rights abuse be pursued by the Sri Lankan government itself, that is: the government investigating its brutality, hardly anything radical or effective. This, and the call for “rapid and unhindered access” for humanitarian aid from the UN and International Committee of the Red Cross, was the only significant difference from another resolution proposed by the majority, mostly Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) countries. Chile was the only NAM member to vote against the majority, which wanted no investigation at all. And the “rapid and unhindered access” for humanitarian aid was reduced to: “provide access as may be appropriate”, thereby giving Sri Lanka’s government the power to use food/water/medicine as a weapon against their enemy: the Tamil people and not the now defeated LTTE.

Sri Lanka was present at the HRC sessions as an observer. It had been a member from 2006 to 2008 when it lost reelection as one of the six Asian State members. Poignantly overlooked by most NAM members assembled a year later, it had been severely criticized by Tamils around the world and by internationally respected Nobel Peace Prize winners Desmond Tutu and Adolfo Perez Esquivel.

“The systematic abuses by Sri Lanka government forces are among the most serious imaginable. Torture and extrajudicial killings are widespread [as is] kidnappings of its own people,” said Tutu in May 2008 when opposing its seat on the Human Rights Council.

A year later, the HRC majority unfastidiously praised Sri Lanka for continuing “to uphold its human rights obligations and the norms of international human rights law”. The key promoter of the majority resolution was, to my dismay, Cuba—the homeland of my heart and where I had lived and worked for the government for eight years.

The Cuban ambassador to the Council, Juan Antonio Fernández Palacios—who also spoke on behalf of the NAM—praised Sri Lanka’s governments over the years, and “congratulates” it on “putting an end” to the armed conflict. A key sentence is: “Sri Lanka’s sovereign right to fight terrorism and separatism within its undisputed borders must be respected.” The words “separatism” and “undisputed borders” will be dealt with at length later. But no one familiar with the history of Sinhalese and Tamils for decades since independence and centuries before could have chosen to speak of “undisputed borders”. Tamils had a homeland, two kingdoms, for centuries before the Sinhalese came to the island and for centuries afterwards.

Cuba also acted as a special advocate for Sri Lanka as an “interlocutor”, in addition to Egypt, India and Pakistan. The resolution about Sri Lanka was actually its own draft, which Cuba tabled.⁴

Just before the vote, the Bolivian HRC ambassador, Ms. Angélica Navarro Llames, made it clear she was perturbed by the manner in which many of the 17 countries had presented their resolution and for insisting upon a special meeting just a week before the scheduled one. She objected to “neocolonialist attitudes”. The Bolivian then spoke of LTTE terrorism used against the people and the government and people, and defended its right to fight for its sovereignty.

Resolution S-11/1 adopted by the majority (29 members for, 12 against, 6 abstentions). Here are pertinent excerpts:

Reaffirming the respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, and its sovereign rights to protect its citizens and combat terrorism,

Condemning all attacks that the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) launched on the civilian population and its practice of using civilians as human shields…

Welcoming the conclusion of hostilities and the liberation by the Government of Sri Lanka of tens of thousands of its citizens that were kept by the LTTE against their will as hostages, as well as the efforts by the Government to ensure safety and security for all Sri Lankans and bringing permanent peace to the country…

Emphasizing that after the conclusion of hostilities, the priority in terms of human rights remains the provision of the necessary assistance to ensure relief and rehabilitation of persons affected by the conflict, including internally displaced persons, as well as the reconstruction of the country’s economy and infrastructure,

Encouraged by the provision of basic humanitarian assistance, in particular, safe drinking water, sanitation, food, and medical and health care services to the IDPs [Internally Displaced Persons] by the Government of Sri Lanka with the assistance of the United Nations agencies…

1. Commends the measures taken by the Government of Sri Lanka to address the urgent needs of the Internally Displaced Persons;

2. Welcomes the continued commitment of Sri Lanka to the promotion and protection of all human rights and encourages it to continue to uphold its human rights obligations and the norms of international human rights law;…

5. Acknowledges the commitment of the Government of Sri Lanka to provide access as may be appropriate to international humanitarian agencies in order to ensure humanitarian assistance to the population affected by the conflict, in particular IDPs…

In Favour: Angola, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Madagascar, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Uruguay, Zambia;

Against: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland;

Abstaining: Argentina, Gabon, Japan, Mauritius, Republic of Korea, Ukraine.”⁴

I will show in upcoming articles how points 1, 2, and 5 cited here have never been the reality; Sri Lanka has not respected Tamils lives or their rights nor provided them their “urgent needs.”

Terrorism and Genocide

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was first dubbed a terrorist organization by India, in 1992. Ironically, it wasn’t until 1998 that Sri Lanka’s government so characterized them, and it did so only after the US did, in 1997. On May 30, 2006, the EU placed LTTE on its terrorist list and banned the organization. It made it a terrorist crime to economically or military aid LTTE, and it froze all LTTE bank and financial assets in Europe. The EU appeared to be even-handed by calling upon the Sri Lankan government to end its “culture of impunity” and to “curb violence” in its areas of control. At the time of LTTE’s defeat, 32 countries had defined them as terrorists.

Never having been in Sri Lanka or South Asia, it is difficult for me to know whether LTTE was a decidedly terrorist organization or not—that is, one which seeks to terrorize civilians. After reading many accounts of atrocities, such as killing hundreds of civilian Sinhalese in their homes, on buses and trains, I conclude that this once Marxist revolutionary organization resorted to terrorism.

At the same time, it must not be forgotten that any liberation movement the world’s greatest state terrorist, the United States of America does not agree with is “terrorist” and therefore illegitimate. Other terrorists, such as the government of the separatist state of Kosovo, are no longer considered terrorist although its drug-smuggling paramilitary organization had been so described, even by the US. Superpowers support or oppose autonomy-independence when it suits their interests. This is also the case with Ireland, the Basques in Spain, and the Palestinians.

Furthermore, the US systematically practices terrorism in its permanent war—invading or “intervening” militarily in 66 countries, a total of 159 times since World War Two.

We must lament the unacceptable methods the LTTE used against many people, and do so without ignoring the history of why and how it was born. Nor must we reject out-of-hand the basic rights and needs of the Tamil people. Their plight must not be abandoned, especially by governments and organizations grounded in anti-imperialism and equality amongst peoples.

Sri Lanka’s history since independence is one of conducting genocide against the Tamils. Genocide is defined by the UN, and Sri Lanka ratified its promise to adhere to it on October 12, 1950.The Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted December 9, 1948 and entered into force, January 12, 1951, states:

Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
   (a) Killing members of the group;
   (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
   (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
   (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
   (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.⁵

Destroying “in whole or in part” an ethnic group is certainly what Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese governments, as well as Buddhist monks, have been doing to the Tamils for six decades. Evidence will be forthcoming. There is so much evidence that even a former US deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan Administration filed a 12-count indictment against S.L. defense secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse and army commander Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka for “perpetrating genocide against Tamil civilians.”

The suit was filed by Bruce Fein, in February 2009, in the U.S. District Court, Central District of California.

The case can be filed in the US because G. Rajapakse is a naturalized citizen and Fonseka holds a resident green card. They are charged with responsibility for: “3,750 alleged extrajudicial killings, with 10,000 suffering bodily injury and more than 1.3 million displacements,” which, according to Fein, “far exceed displacements in Kosovo which led to genocide counts before the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.”

Fein noted that G. Rajapakse said in a BBC interview that, “if you are not fighting the Tamil Tigers you are a terrorist and we’ll kill you.” The attorney represents Tamils Against Genocide. He believes that G. Rajapakse will be “the best witness of the genocide.”

Why ALBA voted as it did: Some points of contention:

I ask the three ALBA governments, which voted for the above resolution, to take Sri Lanka’s government to account on the serious charge of genocide against the Tamil people. At the very least, ALBA should be able to see that hundreds of thousands of displaced persons are brutally treated, and that routine discrimination and abuse have been the Tamil’s plight at the hands of Sinhalese. This is a dichotomy to ALBA’s ideology of equal rights for all: in language, in religion, in the economy, in all aspects of life. In fact, the very new constitution of Bolivia recognizes itself as a pluri-nation in which all the languages and religions of all the peoples are recognized equally. The same is the case in Venezuela with its new constitution.

How can it be, then, that these peoples’ governments have fallen in the arms of such an oppressive, racist government? Possible reasons are:

1. Separatism! It is ironic and ideologically insupportable that anti-imperialist progressive and revolutionary leaders in Cuba, Nicaragua and Bolivia—mainly dark-skinned peoples, and many of them, especially in Bolivia, are Original Peoples long abused by many whites and creoles—side with the Sinhalese chauvinist elite in Sri Lanka. Perhaps they have not studied the sordid history of Sri Lanka. But more certainly is it that they do not support separatism or dual nationhood within one land mass. Cuba especially has, from its revolutionary start, argued for unity. What Cuba and the others fail to realize or acknowledge is that the Tamil people had tried for decades to achieve equal rights with the Sinhalese, many of whom assert adherence to Marxism, yet to no avail. Most Sinhalese do not wish to unify equally with the other ethnic group. Once peaceful means are exhausted, armed struggle is the only means to achieve liberation, as was the case with Cuba and other Latin American guerrilla movements.

In the case of Sri Lanka and separatism, ALBA governments could be prompted to side with it because of, in part, the role of China! The threat of separatism, which has been the desire of many Tibetan Buddhists, is an impelling factor for China’s position of one nation in its own region, and may be how it views the situation of Tamils in Sri Lanka. Here, China sides, ironically, with Buddhists against Hindus-Christians-Muslims.

Bolivia and Venezuela, too, are pressed by separatist demands but they come not from an ethnic group but from a rich class of Whites-Creoles, which has no historic ethnic Homeland.

2. Geo-politics! Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese-dominated governments have been supported militarily and economically by many States, some of which are sometimes antagonistic to one another. Some leftist governments and leftist organizations often operate on the notion that the enemy of my enemy is a friend. If that is the way some socialist-communist-revolutionaries view China and Iran, both totalitarian regimes, in regards to US-Europe-Canada-Australia-Japan imperialism when it comes to Sri Lanka they are mistaken. Surely there are economic and geo-political interests on the part of China and Iran in investing and trading with countries in development, including Sri Lanka but also Cuba and all in Latin America. Fortunately most Latin Americans and the majority of their governments have ceased jumping when a US president or general barks, and they are combining in regional alliances and seeking foreign investments and aid from non-traditional partners.

Since China and Iran began extending their interests into Sri Lanka and sided with its brutal treatment of Tamils, many leftists and progressive governments could think in the black-white geo-political manner. The US-EU states, for their own propaganda image, question Sri Lanka for possible abuses of human rights against Tamils. Ah, no one with experience or knowledge about the duplicity of the empire and its allies could side with them so one must back the other side.

But China is no longer socialist, rather its economy is mainly based on government-sponsored private enterprise with exploitation of labor in the extreme: no union protection, long work hours, low wages, child labor, no say on the job or national and international policies. The working class no longer even has access to full education and health care without paying on a capitalist basis. In fact, workers in most capitalist countries in Europe have better access to health care than workers do in China. Millionaire capitalists now sit on leadership bodies of the so-called Communist Party, and make important decisions over the heads of workers and the population. China is interested mainly in accumulating capital in the grand old raw capitalist style, and it owns more of the US economy (8%) than any other government or economic entity. China’s economy is intricately interdependent upon the US’s capitalism and its imperialist wars.

Iran is run by fundamentalist religious fanaticism. Its economy is basically a capitalist one. Its working class, just as the working class in China, is not a decision-maker. Iran is also a warring partner with US imperialism in its illegal war against Iraq, whose troops are a key factor in the violence against millions of Iraqis. Iran supports their co-religious Muslims in the Quisling government under US domination.

Is it possible that the developing countries, which back Sri Lanka against the Tamil population, do so out of economic reasons? China and Iran provide needed investments and technology and thus one must not criticize. Is that possible, and if so is it ethical, is it consistent with our humanitarian principles and socialist ideology? Cannot one be a trading partner without cowing politically?

Another issue is secularism. The ALBA countries and all truly socialist oriented governments are not and cannot be theocracies! How can secular nation states and organizations consider the Sri Lanka state “democratic socialist” when it declares a religion, and only one, as THE national and official religion? Secularism is the only common ground by which all can be united.

Conclusion

I concur with progressive Tamils in the Tamil Nadu state of India, who have for decades supported Cuba and the new ALBA formation. The Latin American Friendship Association there has held many solidarity activities for these countries, and published scores of books by Latin American authors, including Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Upon learning of the HRC resolution, they were appalled. The author of the excerpted letter below is Amarantha Visalakshi. For 25 years, she has translated books about Latin America into Tamil and written some herself.

We here in Tamil Nadu celebrated the 80th birthday of Comrade Fidel by releasing eight books on Cuba’s achievements in various fields… and are in the midst of our preparation for the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and evaluation of the consolidation of Latin American countries in ALBA…

We are struck dumb and rendered disheartened and disillusioned by this act [the HRC resolution] by those countries of Latin America on which we have pinned our hopes for the future—Socialism of the 21st century.

Why do these countries wish for wiping out the Tamils from the Sri Lankan soil where they rightfully belong? What are the sources of information for these Latin American countries to decide against the Tamils and in favour of the racist Sri Lankan government in the UN Human Rights Council?… more than any other time we feel the absence of Che Guevara, the true internationalist, who laid down his life for the oppressed people of the world.

I also concur with Australia’s largest left-wing organization, the Democratic Socialist Perspective and Socialist Alliance, which publishes greenleft.org.au.

We need “to undertake work to help convince the revolutionary governments of Latin America, including Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, to cease support for the Sri Lankan government, and to recognize the national rights of the Tamil people. There is a long-run danger if revolutionary governments, for whatever reason, fail to support genuine movements for national self-determination in Third World countries, and endorse repressive regimes on the basis of a bogus ‘anti-imperialism…’”

1. Fidel told writer-photographer Lee Lockwood: Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel, Macmillan, N.Y. 1967.
2. Socialism and man, Marcha, Uruguay, March 12, 1965.
3. “Hugo Chavez praises President Rajapaksa’s leadership in defeating LTTE”, Sri Lanka Daily News, September 4, 2009. In this piece, published by a pro-government newspaper, there is not one quotation by Hugo Chavez, who spoke with Rajapakse when they were in Libya. The piece paraphrases what the anonymous writer asserts Chavez having said; an example: Chavez apparently said that the defeat of LTTE terrorism “is a glowing example to other countries beset with the same problem,” words of the writer. Chavez allegedly praised Rajapakse for his leadership.
4. 1, 2, 3.
5. Source. Although the US signed the 1948 convention, it did not accede to it until November 1988. As of 2008, 140 nation states have acceded.

On May Day Havana is a melting pot of labor solidarity. Photo: Bill Hackwell

On that day 50 years ago, Fidel said, “A wonderful future awaits our country if we dedicate ourselves to work with all our might.”

The historic and indelible advantages Cubans earned from forging an incipient socialism following the nation’s real independence, with its ensuing products and services for all, was supported by the vast majority of the population, especially in the early years. Just to mention some benefits: free and ample health care and education for all; clothing and food for all babies and school children; free or inexpensive access to all sports and cultural events; the assurance that no resident go without minimal nutrition and a residence; the right for all to obtain work. And the spirit, the spirit of idealistic Don Quixote, and that of the thoroughly dedicated revolutionary guerrilla, El Che.

However, today, fifty years later, there is still a long ways to go to advance the interests, energies and the wisdom of Cuba’s working people. It is a sad fact of reality, which must be confronted today, that many Cubans have not worked “with all our might.”

The nation is fraught with passivity, poor production in quantity and quality. I believe this is so in large part because people lack the real power to make decisions at their work centers, schools, and even in their local governments and provincial and national legislatures.

Cuban Workers March on May Day. Photo: Bill Hackwell

They are not in control of their work, their production, or of product distribution. Too many people are not contributing to society’s needs; too many people are skimming off the enticing plate of foreign capitalism; too many people have lost their morality, their solidarity and have succumbed to their thirst for the tinted silver plate.

Today, half a century after the great victory, its no secret that many people are tired and discontent. The four main areas of dissatisfaction, as I see it, are: a) low salaries and the two currency system, which separates people; b) shortages of sufficient foodstuffs and other basic goods; c) perpetual lack of sufficient housing made worse by last year’s hurricane destruction; d) insufficient improvement in worker empowerment, with few exceptions.

And then, for many -especially the revolutionary conscious people who linger in the days of Che enthusiasm for creating the new man and woman- there is the crippling effect that the government continues to limit the access to ample information and real debate, hampering an exchange of ideas necessary for them to become empowered.

This has led to a sizeable segment of the population, especially youth, to be disbelievers of what they are told by the government and its mass media. They hunger for more and open information.

There are a few signs of movement, not least among some university students and professors. On this May Day 2009, let us listen carefully and join those voices.

Cuba marked 50 years of revolution, January 1, 2009. The island-nation has survived the longest and harshest imperialist blockade and thousands of violent actions against its existence. Several thousands of people have been murdered or rendered crippled by sabotage and even bacteriological warfare—not to mention innumerable attempts on the lives of Fidel Castro and other leaders.

The Communist party and state strategy for survival has focused on unity: unity in decision-making, unity of leadership, and unity in the media. This strategy has enabled the state to resist United States and allied efforts to smash it. However, this strategy has prevented leaders and the state bureaucracy from believing that it can afford the “luxury”of allowing significant active participation on the part of the population to discuss and decide what the nation’s politics and economy ought to be. Nor do the media question decisions taken.

When questioned about the wisdom of this control, the state either ignores the question or responds with examples of how the US intelligence apparatuses intervene in other countries’ processes when not in US interests. Suffice it here to note the successful subversive interventions in media organs during Allende’s term in Chile, and in Nicaragua during the first Sandinista government from 1979-1990. Currently, US counter-intelligence and media apparatuses align with the national oligarchy in Venezuela endeavoring to overthrow Hugo Chavez and stop any advance toward socialism.

Cuba’s communist leadership has always asserted that broad exercise of freedom of expression can place the nation’s very sovereignty in peril. While there is some truth to this historically, strict state control of the media and other channels of information and debate cripple the ability of the common man and woman from acquiring adequate information and ideas necessary for them to become empowered. This has led most people to become disbelievers of state propaganda and the media. They hunger for more and open information.

Cuban historian and professor of the University of Oriente, Frank Josué Solar, recently wrote:

“It is not a question of luxury, an alternative which one can choose or not: worker democracy is a condition sin qua non for the normal unfolding of a socialist economy. Without this it is deformed, and finally perishes.”¹

For the first time in decades, the state has allowed open critique of policies from the left. Handfuls of students, professors and professionals at the University of Havana and at Cujae University are meeting to discuss socialism’s future.

A group of university students, professors and professionals formed the Bolshevik Workshop to pay homage to the Russian revolution, at the 90th year anniversary in November 2007, and to discuss its trajectory and collapse. Some 500 people assembled at the University of Havana. Much of the discussion revolved around the degradation of the Soviets, the state´s total seizure of power and its control over decision-making—all which led to a passive populace, which did not resist the collapse.

Many participants concluded as did Frank Josué in his article: “What failed in the Soviet Union was not the planned economy model but a type of bueaucratic management, which converted into an absolute brake upon all of its potential development. Just as the human body requires oxygen, this economic organization requires a collective direction by the working class for its functioning.”

One of the workshop organizers, Ariel Dacal Díaz, a professor of law, delivered a paper on the subject.²

At this assembly, and at a subsequent workshop, participants viewed the need to revitalize revolutionary Marxism, also in Cuba. The university administration sought to curtail the movement and refused to allow large meetings. In this context, the administration also banned the department of philosophy’s magazine, Critical Thinking (Pensamiento Crítico). An article, which analysed the fall of the USSR to revisionism, was not well viewed.

The dozen coordinators of the workshop did not hold public meetings again in 2008 but did create a lively website. They propose to “contribute to the empowerment of persons and groups in their practice as citizen-subjects within the Cuban revolution as a process and with socialism as its project.”

The website has hundreds of essays and articles by readers and past and current theoreticians and leading activists such as: Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, Luxemburg, Che…Stalin is viewed as having thwarted a true socialist direction based on workers’ power.

At the end of January this year, the coordinators organized another workshop by the name: “To live the revolution 50 years after the triumph.” They now meet monthly at the Ministry of Culture’s Center of Juan Marinello, close to Revolutionary Square. The Ministry´s Antonio Gramsci Department and the Superior Institute of Art are cosponsors. The meeting hall allotted can hold just under 100 persons. It was full at the initial workshop where the theme was: the historic sovietization of Cuba and what remains today. This lay the basis for the following workshop—“The political system of the revolution: participation, popular subject and citizenship”—which I attended.

In its announcement folder, the coordinators wrote: “This workshop seeks to contribute to revitalize and analyze the place of citizenry participation in the political system, its forms of expression concerning sovereignty, the necessity of a political and legal culture consistent with social protagonism at the moment to create, control, limit and enjoy the political and the law.”

Specific topics were: how does socialism reformulate the concept of citizenship; mechanism’s of actual popular participation; how to contribute to empowerment. All this within the context of, “We make our revolution.”

After a brief introduction, the 80-90 participants broke into four groups to discuss what experiences they had with active participation and with forced participation, and how they felt as subject-citizens. (My participation was mainly as an observer since I do not currently live and work in Cuba, which I did from 1987 to 1996.)

Most people chose to express negative experiences, which had left them feeling frustrated, impotent and not as active citizens. When a philosophy student said that he did not feel represented in the political decision-making process most within our circle nodded in affirmation. Another student said that it was possible “to participate but ‘they’ make the decisions”. A young woman student spoke enthusiastically about this workshop initiative, which allowed her to feel as an active subject, “hoping it can lead to making a difference for the society.” A Colombia studying here said he felt more as a subject in Cuba than in Colombia but hoped for greater active participation.

An older woman, who classified herself as an ordinary worker, said she felt isolated. “’They’ don’t give me a chance to participate in any real sense. ‘They’ don’t take our commentaries seriously, so I feel like a crazy old woman.” During a break, she said she believed the revolution has stood still since the mid-60s. A couple of older professional men, remembering those activist days when peasants and militia still carried weapons to defend the nation—which they did at the Bay of Pigs invasion and against counter-revolutionary groups infiltrated and financed by the CIA (Operation Mongoose)—believed the revolution died after that.

The walls were covered with handwritten quotations by Bertolt Brecht, Roque Dalton, Silivo Rodriguez and others. On one wall were posted words by Paulo Freire: “If the structure does not permit dialogue the structure must be changed.”

Summaries of each group’s discussion were read during the last plenary session. The experiences and sentiments were similar. Bureaucratic mechanism’s of control were outlined and criticized during the discussion period. Much of state propaganda—“everything is marching well”—was considered false. People rejected the constantly repeated institutionalized excuse—imperialism´s blockade—for the multitude of problems and inefficiencies, and that the blockade impedes debate. An internal blockade exists, said many.

There was ample self-critique as well. We must overcome self-censorship. We must not yield to the fear of losing what we may have or hope to obtain, such as a better position, and thereby remain silent in face of unfairness or wrong decisions. One young man said each of us should find ways to improve our own behavior. For example, we must stop throwing wastes and trash anywhere we feel like it. We should intervene in all our surroundings with a positive spirit that we can make change, that we can make “them” listen to us, because we are the producers, the people for whom the political structure serves. An older professor suggested we invite bureaucrats to meet with us, “because they are Cubans too and we could learn from one another”.

A young professor of law, Julio Antonio Fernández, gave a brief talk about where the land lay. He brushstroked revolutionary political and legal history. He defended the constitution of 1976 as a revolutionary one, and one legalizing an active citizenry for socialism, one that establishes popular control of all mechanisms for sovereignty. The audience was so attentative a pin could be heard to drop.

“We do not seek to regress to before the revolution: we must be designers and controllers…What is most important now is a critique of current state organisms and not the possible creation of ideal institutions.”

He continued—my paraphrases. If a dominating regime is necessary how can it act without alienating the people? How can we democratize power?

We have formal rights of control, Fernández said. We need to actualize them. The law is not that of the state but that of and for the people. Citizenry duty must be restored. He also spoke against continuing discrimination both of race and gender. The individual and the collective must recognize and confront these ills.

“The danger of imperialism is real and we must find forms to act taking this reality into account,” he concluded.

Following his well received analysis, the body was asked for comments, especially concerning the question of how one can participate in a revolutionary manner. One-fourth of the audience made comments and offered ideas to further the revolutionary process, and some called for action.

Several people, young and old, said that the workshop process and its ideas should go public. There must be ways of involving workers, vital producers. Some said that while laws protect the right to associate and to organize associations, and no law prohibits strikes, the reality is something different. No one dare try to organize strikes, and many who petition for permission to organize associations are ignored or denied their right.

An older lawyer said he was still waiting, now ten years, for a reply from the Ministry of Justice to his several petitions to organize a harmless, social association of descendants of Slavic people in Cuba. A sociology professor said that while some professions were allowed to form associations, those in sociology—a study prohibited in Cuba for three decades, which the government reinstated in the mid-90s—were not. Yet no reason was given.

A history professor said it was necessary to define what socialism really is and what it should be. Among other things, socialism must be personal as well as collective. One must feel that he/she is a decision-maker. Without that sense, what occurred in Russia and Eastern Europe could well occur in Cuba.

“Participation leads to solutions and that is liberating,” he concluded.

Another person said that Internet is a liberating tool and must be made available to all. That will be technologically possible—perhaps economically too—when the Venezuelan undersea cable reaches Cuba later this year. The question is: will the state allow access to all?

One participant raised doubts about whether a dominating state power was any longer a necessity, especially one in which many leaders retain power positions for many years, even decades.

A young female student said she felt stimulated by these worshops and was optimistic that positive changes could be made. Several youths echoed her sentiment. The last speaker, a Brazilian student, said that it was most important that the group not degenerate into sectarianism as do so many left groups around the world.

The next workshop, open to all, will take place on March 27. Its theme will be: state property, social property and the socialization of production within Cuba´s socialist revolution.

1. “Cuba, y el debate del socialism del siglo XXI,” published by the Fundación de Estudios Socialista Federico Engels, www.marxist.com
2. See In Defense of Marxism. See also Walter Lippmann’s yahoo site Cuba/News for the English version.

Prior to the devastating hurricanes last fall, the government had planned a major celebration with visiting foreign presidents and military parades. Because of this natural setback and other economic setbacks—the global economic crisis which has reduced the price of export resources such as nickel and sugar and the number of tourists—the government toned down its plans limiting its celebration to meet austere realities. No foreign leaders were present.

The national act was held in Cespedes Park, in Santiago de Cuba, where Fidel spoke on January 1, 1959 after taking over the city. The area is small and seats only 3000 people. Almost all the invited guests were Cubans. The streets around the park were nearly deserted with the exception of a few civilian block guards and security personnel. There were no cheering crowds.

In the rest of Cuba, celebrations were limited to outdoor musical shows.

The act in Santiago de Cuba was covered by about 120-150 foreign journalists transported by aircraft to the city and then in four buses from the airport. I did not see any organized international solidarity brigades or delegations as previously expected.

A documentary was shown on a dozen outdoor screens during the first hour of the one hour and forty-five minute act. There were two dances, a few songs and poems honoring martyrs of the revolutionary struggle. Then President Raul Castro spoke for half-an-hour. He was briefly interrupted six times by modest applauses.

This is a brief summary of the essence of his speech, and not necessarily transcribed in sequence.

¨We have transformed dreams into realities…Our revolution is a permanent struggle, which continues today and will for the next 50 years…Today the revolution is stronger than ever¨

In regards the last citation, Raul referred immediately afterward to the famous speech that Fidel made to students on November 17, 2005. Fidel said, in essence, that the enemy cannot destroy the revolution but that Cubans can—because of lack of revolutionary morality and poor production—and it would be their fault.

This seems, to my way of thinking, to be a contradiction to the thought expressed that the revolution is stronger than ever. Some delegates told me afterwards that they thought Raul was right because Cuba always lands on its feet and resists the worst of what the enemy launches at them. However, many Cubans are fleeing the land in order to improve their economic possibilities and many Cubans with whom I have worked during the eight years I lived here do not share these delegates opinion. The double economy is a divisive factor yet Raul chose not to delve into this theme.

The only time in which Raul spoke of internal problems was in reference to persons who chose not to work but to hustle as parasites, seeking the easy life. He quickly mentioned that criticism was useful but warned against division, which leads to defeat.

Raul sketched the history of US subversion, direct and indirect, violent and economic against Cuba during the entire history. The US, and its Cuban exile terrorists, have murdered 3,478 Cubans and handicapped 2099. ¨Liberty has a high price,¨ Raul concluded.

In three occasions, Raul referred to Fidel and his historic role. These were the points of greatest applause.

For a veteran following the Cuban revolution for half-a-century, I was disappointed at the austerity of its official celebration.

The Cuban revolution was declared to be socialist by Fidel Castro speaking before an approving crowd as US planes flew over Havana dropping bombs. The April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion had begun. Following its rapid failure, President JF Kennedy instituted a blockade of Cuba, which remains today.

In 1967, President LB Johnson, then bogged down in war against the Indo-Chinese peoples, expressed to a reporter: “We were running a goddamn Murder Incorporated in the Caribbean”. He said so after learning the CIA had used the Mafia to try to assassinate Fidel Castro. The CIA was also infecting humans, animals and crops with poisons, terrorizing its people from the air and on the ground. (See my book, Backfire: The CIA’s Biggest Burn, Editorial Jose Marti, Havana, 1991.)

Readers here are familiar enough with the history of US subversion against the Cuban revolution that I merely touch on it, in order to set the background for why the original Marxist ideas of political democracy and workers control, of equality in economy without privileges to any sector or leaders were not thoroughly forthcoming, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union and Cuba’s other trading partners in Comecon. In addition to external attacks, which have twisted development, are adverse decisions taken by the national government as well as realities of underdevelopment.

Now, however, nearly two decades after the fall of Comecon and as Cuba begins to celebrate its 50th anniversary, it is the only remaining socialist country, at least in the western hemisphere (perhaps in the entire world given that China and the Indo-Chinese countries have converted nearly totally into capitalist economies). Cuba maintains its socialist roots and Marxist socialist ideology although the “Special Period” concessions to capitalist measures installed for shear survival have created inequality: a growing gap between a new poor and a new rich.

“This country can self-destruct; this Revolution can destroy itself, but they [the US] can never destroy us; we can destroy ourselves, and it would be our fault,” so spoke Fidel Castro, November 17, 2005, about the consequences of a double economy and decay in morality and consciousness.

Four areas of greatest popular discontent are: a) the double economy, two currencies; b) too much reliance on imports and not enough national production; c) perpetual lack of sufficient housing made worse by this year’s hurricane destructions; d) insignificant improvement in worker empowerment, with few exceptions.

A large part of the population has become disillusioned. It steals and hustles simply to meet basic needs, and many fall into the pit of consumerism, pursuing individual greed. These growing sectors have rejected the motto set by the revolution—in the words of Che—“The ultimate and most important revolutionary aspiration: to see man liberated from alienation”.

The “new class”, of which Fidel also spoke three years ago, includes private farmers, self-employed artisans and handymen, a large number who legally earn convertible currency at their jobs, some who receive large sums of remittances from family members living abroad, and a growing sub class of thieves.

Those who must live exclusively on national pesos can not afford to buy basic items, such as shampoo and soaps, clothes, hardware, household appliances or even sufficient food stuff—not to mention repair materials for their residences, which can not be found in pesos. The amount of items remaining on subsidized rations is insufficient for survival. People, especially in the large cities, must find ways of supplementing their meager earnings.

A renowned economist, Dr. Omar Everleny, told me: “You can’t stimulate people with morality, with revolutionary propaganda, with anti-imperialism for a lifetime. People get tired of this and they must eat. Sure, everybody goes to the plaza for the marches, but when they return home they demand that the state provides them with their needs.”

Almost all the department stores in Havana, for instance, now only sell goods in convertible currency (cucs). The cheapest radio, for example, costs 13 cucs and is driven, foolishly enough, only on batteries. The store did not have batteries when I bought mine. I finally found batteries (6 cucs) after searching in 15 stores. The total price (24 pesos per cuc) came to 456 pesos, which is over twice the minimum monthly wage.

One sees youths, who have never worked, spending more money drinking beer in one session than a pensioner must live on for an entire month. These same teenagers often adorn themselves in gaudy t-shirts advertizing US capitalism and imperialism, promoting the FBI or the US military—whose illegal base on occupied Cuban territory is a torture chamber. Some of these youths grease their hair, wear their pants midway down their asses, and jabber on mobile telephones, which costs more to buy and speak on than in the rich capitalist west. When I asked some why they behaved thusly, they replied that “it is the fashion”. Maybe so in the decadent west but very few people in Cuba have the money to adopt such a life style even if they wished to, and why should they.

And there are far more cars and motorcycles in the streets than ever before, and fewer bicycles. Most cars are private owned and all parts and the gasoline must be bought in cucs. The price of gasoline is as high as European prices and is double or more the cost in the US. And the state sells bicycles from China only in cucs.

The brain drain to the capitalist world, which the government speaks of lamentably, is a growing phenomenon, but it is also internal. More and more car owners are using their vehicles, especially the old US cars, as taxis. Some do so legally by buying a license, paying taxes and insurance; many do not. Taxi drivers earn more money in one day than my friend, a former captain of Cuban ships, who risked his life as an infiltrator inside enemy lines (the CIA), in an entire month. Acquaintances who have doctorate degrees, who were heads of media outlets, officers and other professionals have left their positions to find ways of earning convertible currency, such as taxi chauffeurs.

The double economy and its negative consequences are so rampant that the government has allowed the film industry to make films with this theme. The most recent one, Horn of Plenty (Cuerno de la abundancia), revolves around the greed and envy connected with this inequality. Rather than concluding, as one would expect by a propaganda-oriented state-run medium, the people involved did not learn their lesson.

Yet most media do not address this problem, or at least do not come up with analyses or solutions. The youth daily, Juventud Rebelde, does have a column of complaints from readers concerning specific failures of agencies and institutions, usually having to do with the lack of promised services and reparations. There are also a few magazines with limited press runs and audiences that do go a bit deeper sometimes: La Geceta, Cajman Barbuda, Caminos.

Caminos is published by the Martin Luther King Memorial Center and is distributed somewhat widely in pesos. It can do so because of donations from solidarity people such as Pastors for Peace.

While no coges lucha (don’t fight city hall) is still a common motto, some Cubans are acting to overcome that anti-revolutionary attitude—which is generated from a deaf bureaucratic institutionalized structure. The MLK center is a protagonist of fighting that attitude. Its director, Rev. Raul Suarez, is so respected that he is an elected delegate to the National Assembly. His center is also a casa comunitaria (community house) run on Paulo Freire participatory sociology principles, seeking to stimulate people to involve themselves in projects to improve the community. While this is progress there are only eight such centers in the entire of Havana.

The next half-century

Once Fidel became ill and stepped down from government, his brother Raul won the next elections. Many see him as an innovator. He has broadened some rights, such as that anyone with hard currency can buy imported mobile telephones, computers, cars, etc. and rent luxurious hotel rooms. But that does not affect the vast majority of Cubans. During his term thus far, and also due to the most damaging hurricanes in modern history, the gap between the new rich and a relative poor sector is increasing. Some think Raul will take the country more in the direction of China. Signs include: granting more land to private farmers; greater monetary incentives for farm production teams; the raising of retirement age by five years (women from 55 to 60; men from 60 to 65); increased credits and trade with China, buying everything from cheap items made by over-exploited workers to modern buses, trains and all sorts of manufactured items for energy and infrastructure.

The fact that Cuba has survived the wrath of US imperialism, whereas no other country attempting socialism has (we must wait more for Venezuela’s development to make a judgment here), is a miracle in itself and enough reason for solidarity people abroad not to be disillusioned. Nevertheless, 70% of the population was born after 1959 and much of it demands greater results than has been forthcoming. One cannot placate these demands by harping on the gains of, for example, free and full medical care, especially when service is less today than for ten years ago, because so many medical workers are abroad on missions.

A successful revolution must be one in permanent development, one that can solve the basic needs of adequate housing, food and clothing otherwise people will seek solutions elsewhere as is evidenced by so many people leaving Cuba for economic gain. And for those who remain, they are glad if they have family members working abroad, including the land of the enemy, who send them benefits from capitalism’s exploitative economy. That is not the way to teach one’s people that socialism has greater virtues than capitalism.

People ask: why is the best service, the best production made by those earning lots of money in convertible currency? Is that not evidence that privatization (capitalism) is more effective?

The answer must lay in having confidence in the workers to run the farms and factories, to eliminate the hated and incompetent bureaucracy, to instill true debate and democratic decision-making. We must note that no working class has had the real power or exercised it, in order to build real socialism, or any system for that matter. And true democracy is impossible without the mass of people holding the cards. Perhaps, as some interpret the ideas of Marx, this cannot happen until world capitalism is defeated and swept aside so that the construction of socialism by the working class itself can begin. The progressive regional alliances taking root in Latin America is a good sign for the future of survival and for socialism to grow IF capitalism is rejected.

The globalized economic crisis upon us could be an excellent opportunity for working classes the world over to shed capitalist solutions and begin the process of socialist transformations. But that requires sacrifice and struggle at the risk of jail and death at the hands of the owners’ police and soldier traitors. That also requires prepared revolutionary forces. My reading of the times, unfortunately, is that most of the workings classes are not ready, which means that to solve their immediate needs they could go to the right, even towards fascism. The culture of fear with its terrorist wars and rampant racism throughout the institutions and governments in Europe, the US and elsewhere, could very well lead the world into a new fascist era.

The progressive regional alliances taking root in Latin America is a good sign for the future of survival of an independent continent, one in which socialism sows roots, and for the rebirth of a better socialism in Cuba.

I worked for Editorial Jose Marti and Prensa Latina (1987-96), and have been here on extensive visits in 2006 and currently. I have written five books about Cuba and hundreds of articles. To understand the Cuban revolution is a life study. For the present, I intend to narrate my impressions of some of its reality. A definitive description or analysis is beyond my capacity.

“Ser internacionalista es sladar nuestra propia deuda con la humanidad.” — To be internationalist is to settle our own debt with humanity.

This is a billboard, the first I remember seeing upon arrival in 1987, which expresses the morality with which this revolution began and its performance in nearly half the planet. In a recent Cuban education channel broadcast made by Pastors for Peace leader Rev. Lucius Walker, he spoke of these 50 years of practicing solidarity as what Jesus Christ would have wanted the human race to emulate: constant support for the poor, the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, the exploited and imprisoned. Walker wished that his country — the USA — would take up Cuba’s living example.

The revolution’s solidarity ethic started at home. From the first, racism was officially abolished everywhere. Small farmers and would-be farmers were given up to 5 caballerias (13.42 hectares per caballeria) of land to till as promised during the armed struggle against US-backed dictator Batista. The new president, Raul Castro, has just extended this by one or two caballerias for the most productive. The rest of the land, bought from private owners (national and international), was turned into large state collectives and smaller cooperatives. In recent years, almost all the collectives have been converted into more productive cooperatives, both private and state run.

Illiteracy was soon eliminated by 100,000 educated youths teaching 23% of the nation’s illiterates. Promptly, all children were attending school free of charge whereas before 44% of primary school-aged children did not attend school and only 17% of secondary school-aged children did. In these 50 years, nearly one million students have graduated from universities. Today, there are nearly 100,000 students studying full time in 65 universities, plus some 400,000 studying at university level in 3,150 localities in all 169 municipalities. Under Batista there were 20,000 students attending the three state, and one private, universities.

A nation-wide health care system was immediately underway, free of charge. Statistical results show its significance for each and every Cuban. In 1959, infant mortality was at 78.8 per 1000 births; in 2007, it was down to 5.5. Life expectancy was 62 years. Today it stands at 77. There was only one doctor for every 1,800 inhabitants in 1959, after half the six thousand doctors had fled upon the revolutionary victory and following the elimination of private practice. But only a few of the population of 5.5 million was being served. Today, with 75,000 graduated doctors since the revolution and with 11.5 million people, the rate is one to 150. However, nearly half of those doctors are on foreign missions in 68 countries, and several hundreds have fled to other countries seeking greater economic opportunities. This places a greater burden on some 30,000 doctors within the country who must care for greater numbers of patients.

Cuba produces 12 of the 13 vaccines it inoculates each child with. The nation has an exceptional and modern biotechnology industry and has developed unique medicines and vaccines, including the world’s only meningitis B vaccine.

The revolution is also renowned for its excellent sports and culture programs, for its superb athletes, musicians, film makers, detective novel authors, ballet and other dancers.

The nation’s workers and farmers were also set on a solidarity course to serve and produce not just for their benefits but for the entire nation. In the early 1960s, two forms of economic systems were experimented with. One was led by the revolutionary idealist Che Guevara, the other by Carlos Rodriguez, a leader of the Communist Party, which had not joined the armed struggle. In the efforts to create the “new man” in economic production and in the political decision-making process, there were some advances but many retardations, about which I will address in a second story.

International Solidarity

The export of “human capital”, as the state characterizes its humanitarian missions, began in 1963 in Africa and Latin America, later in the Caribbean and other parts of the world by assisting peoples health and educational needs as well helping to bring them away from the domination of exploitative imperialism. Cuba provides more medical humanitarian international aid than all the UN countries deployed through the World Health Organization.

Today, nearly 100,000 medical personnel, teachers, sports instructors, technicians and advisors are serving in 104 countries. In the medical arena alone, over 10 million people, in 68 countries, have been treated just this decade. Millions of people have been aided in a score of countries hit by natural disasters, such as, in 2006, Pakistan, a US war ally. The new Cuban created Operation Miracle has cured upwards to half a million blind patients in 25 countries just since 2004. With Venezuela’s oil profits, and Cuba’s doctors and those it is training in Venezuela, the Venezuela-Cuba plan is to cure 10 million Latin Americans within a decade. Their blindnesses are mostly caused by malnutrition, and this plan coincides with progressive programs to increase national food production through cooperatives and small farming.

Presidents Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez began discussing the creation of a regional socio-economic and political alliance based upon mutual aid and bartering soon after the right-wing coup attempt in Venezuela, in 2002. The Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America (ALBA) took root in 2005. Today, with six countries — Nicaragua, Bolivia, Honduras and Dominican Republic — several billions of dollars in joint projects are underway. This also includes inexpensively sold oil from Venezuela to these countries and the newly formed Petro Caribe alliance.

These socialist oriented programs and alliances were conceived of by Fidel when he received Chavez fresh out of jail two years after his imprisonment for leading the insurrection, in 1992.

“The coming century for us is the century of hope, the century of the resurrection of the Bolivarian dream, the dream of Marti, the Latin American dream.”

President Raul Castro cited his brother’s words in his speech, this December 15th, at a ceremony in Venezuela. In honor of ALBA’s accomplishments and is future agenda. Raul concluded with: “The dreams of yesterday begin to become reality.”

Other important aspects of Cuba’s generous solidarity are its military assistance to other peoples in maintaining or acquiring their sovereignty. This is especially the case in Angola and with important side affects for Namibia and South Africa. Between 1975 and 1990, Cuba sent 300,000 soldier volunteers to Angola to help defeat the invading apartheid government of South Africa, backed by the US. They sought to impose brutal counterrevolutionary groups in power, who would do the empire’s biding.

Raul Castro referred to Cuba’s African role at the December summit meeting of 33 Latin American and Caribbean nations meeting in Brazil. Once the future of Angolan sovereignty became guaranteed, the liberation of Namibia was assured, and this added significantly to the internal struggle for black South Africans’ liberation soon following the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. Mandela came to Havana to express his gratitude for Cuba’s solidarity.

This unique summit in Brazil was especially important for Cuba. Of the various Latin American alliances, Rio Group is an important political forum and it embraced Cuba as a member. Fidel Castro was not able to attend but because of the historic role he played as Cuba’s key leader — and elected president between 1976 until 2007 when, due to ill health, he stepped down and his brother won the elections — he received the strongest applause of all from the forum. The historic role played by Cuba in promoting Latin American sovereignty and integration and the concise and sharp speeches of President Raul Castro occupied Brazil’s, Mexico’s and most of Latin Americas front pages during the summit.

The joyous mood of Latin America’s leaders expressed the new liberating wind blowing throughout this continent. Their message is: it will not be stilled by the empire now entering into decay.

Beyond exporting solidarity and its key role in continental integration, Cuba offers extensive and advanced educational opportunities free of charge to tens of thousands of foreign students in Cuba. In recent years, an entire medical school (ELAM) is dedicated to educating foreign students from some 30 countries, including poor US citizens.

However, there are many Cubans who are not so happy about its nation supplying the world’s most extensive solidarity policies. There is an increasing gap between the new rich and the new poor within the double economy — one in pesos and one in convertible currency. The low-cost subsidized rationed goods are too sparse to meet the very basic needs of daily life. Most earn their livings in pesos and this creates divisions in the population, and even animosity within the medical profession since doctors at home earn only pesos while the foreign mission “volunteers” earn pecuniary rewards that affords many to return home with luxurious hardware and other goods not possible to obtain on the peso economy.

Cuba is the home of my heart, all the more reason to be truthful of its warts. One cannot truly love a people nor have confidence in them if one hides from real problems and shortcomings. That is the subject of the next piece.

Ocumare de la Costa at Cata beach in Aragua state, one of hundreds of coastline beaches

Nothing fancy about the beaches or the small town of 10,000 inhabitants. The most talked about feature is the new therapeutic hospital with Cuban doctors. There are plenty of liquor stores, cafes serving beer, rum and fish, and lottery gambling stalls, which also sell bets on horse races. Profits go to government supported programs.

At one of the beachfront cafes, Diego asked around for a decent and inexpensive hotel for me. A local man guided us to Restaurant Los Nonnos, an Italian restaurant with a guest house. I was the only guest in this house spacious enough for eight persons. I had use of the kitchen and a good double bed.

Diego did not want to stay after our fish soup lunch. He did not care for swimming and he wanted to rejoin his lover for the weekend. So he returned and I went for a swim. The salt water felt good on my skin. I stayed inside the reef, which crossed parallel to the beach about four hundred meters out, stretching from large boulders spilled into the sea from the mountain range. Cata beach is thus enclosed. At peak times about 100 people were on the beach. Most are fearful of the small waves and do not bathe unless the water is calm. This is not a surfers’ beach nor is it an environmentalist haven. Trash lay everywhere despite several trash barrels placed about, which remain empty or nearly so.

I walked a kilometer down the beach, skirting trash, to La Boca. Here, at The Mouth, was fishermen’s turf. There were dozens of small two-man motor boats docked or returning from the day’s fishing. They didn’t bring in many fish but each boat had a share of some of the best tasting fish in the world: dorado, aguja, bonito, pargo. The golden dorado, which weigh from 10 to 20 kilos, and the smaller red snapper (pargo) are my favorite. There were no fancy restaurants but numerous beachfront cafes or even stands that served grilled fish and cold beer.

As the sun sat glowing red, I watched the last boat return with an unusual shark. It was two meters in length. No one knew its name but one man called it “pure water”, because once cut open most of its 40 kilos proved to be nothing but water.

In the evening, I drank beer on Cata beach and watched the women. They were not bashful but were not after a quick sexual encounter either. Women in this country are definitely independent, strong, feminists without hatred of men from what I saw here and in three municipalities I explored and in three visits to Caracas. During the day, many walk on and near the beach in g-strings. Most women normally dress so that their breasts and thighs are high-lighted. But I got no sensation that their display of flesh is meant to entice men, but rather is an expression of liberty and for comfort in this sun-baked land.

The next day, the water was calm and came above the reef line. I knew it was risky but I dared myself to swim over it. Remember the daredevil boy-wants-to-be man syndrome in our youth? I haven’t quite gotten over that even when alone with no one to impress how manly I am. Maybe I do this because I don’t want to be encumbered. The open sea is most inviting, and I had my snorkel and mask so maybe I could see some large fish.

I floated cautiously over the sharp-pointed reef, about three to four meters wide and into freedom. The feeling that I can do it propels me more than common sense. After a fruitless search for fish yet having showed myself that “I can still do it at my age” I turned back toward the beach. Though the current was not strong I had neglected to take into account that ebb and flow directions make a difference. As I approached the reef the current pushed me forward. I could not control my body entirely. As I lay flat above the reef, the inward current forced my legs downward. I could only manage to resist with one, the other foot scarped upon a reef. I ignored whatever damage may have been caused and swam to the beach with decreasing lung capacity.

Once upon the sand, I saw blood running from the gash alongside my big toe. I collected my shirt and short pants and hobbled up the beach to a police station, which fortunately was no more than a couple hundred meters away. A policewoman gave me toilet paper to hold over my bleeding foot. She asked for identification but I had left it at the hotel. I only had a few Bolivars in my pocket. She and another policeman drove me the 10 kilometers to the Ocumare town emergency clinic. The hospital did not treat wounds.

I hobbled into the clinic as the police watched, ready to help if needed while respectful of do-it-yourself life approach whenever possible. There were a handful of patients but no waiting line. A nurse immediately guided me into a treatment room and the police departed. In the ensuing half-an-hour, three nurses and a doctor—all Venezuelan women—looked in on me. My foot was washed and I was given an anesthesia prior to being stitched. They all asked what had happened to my foot. Nurses, and the doctor, Dalia, about 55 years old, laughed as I explained my discovery that ocean waves and currents are stronger than my macho attitude.

Despite the anesthesia, it was still painful as Dalia sewed eight stitches through five centimeters of skin tightened over foot bone. They gave me another shot and asked me to sing. I am a terrible singer and know no songs but I managed to recall from my teenage years in Brazil a couple verses of a song about cachaza (a sugar cane pure brandy).

The medical workers appreciated my self-critique and humor. I appreciated their skill and affectionate care. After I was bandaged, the doctor had to fill out a brief form. It did not matter that I had no ID. Dalia just wrote down my name, age, the nature of injury and treatment. She wrote out a prescription against infection and swelling, and then told me:

“I love this revolution. I am a Colombian forced to flee 35 years ago. These past nine years have been most wonderful. Never before has a president cared for his people as does Chavez. He is almost too good,” she said, adding that his big heart causes some people to enshroud themselves in a sense of worthlessness.

There was no fee, not even for foreigners, and no papers for me to fill out. I later asked at a La Victoria private clinic what this would have cost: at least 100BF. I asked why people still came for private treatment when government health care was free.

“Oh, our services are better, and we are quicker. The government hospitals and clinics are not as good as private ones and they are all full,” the receptionist replied.

It was only two hundred meters from the Ocumare clinic to the pharmacy where I paid 6BF, less than $3, for the pills. Within a few minutes, I caught a taxi back to the beach town where I sat at a café table on the sand and ate the day’s catch—dorado—and drank my name. Ron in Spanish means rum.

As I watched the sun set, I felt content and wiser. Through this accident, one I unnecessarily caused, I had learned first hand how well the new health care system functions. The emergency service clinics, and the 2,700 community health centers constructed in five years, part of the Barrio Adentro Misión (Inside the Barrio Mission), has profoundly improved the health and welfare of more than half the nation not previously covered by medical care. Three thousand more health centers are under construction, according to the ministry’s August 2008 figures. True, many of the old hospitals are deteriorated and there is not uniformly accessible, excellent health care everywhere, but how can the right-wing make that an issue against the current government when they did nothing for the people’s health care when they ruled Venezuela.

Two days later, I splurged on a taxi to the airport, about a two-hour ride from La Victoria, depending on the traffic. The night before, I’d said my farewells to my new friends. Over the course of my time here they had all warned me about watching my back and my wallet. Maybe I was lucky, maybe careful enough but I was never attacked or robbed, and no one had short-changed me in the entire time.

The airport was packed, five long lines waited to pass through the first check-in. In all, our baggage was checked three times, and our persons once or twice. There were the civilian airline checkers, the customs, and the National Guard specializing in drug detection. When my flight was called and my ticket checked, I was asked to stand aside. Eventually, three young women from three countries were also standing aside. We were escorted outside near the aircraft where National Guardsmen opened our bags in our presence. We were politely told that the cameras and scanners can not always see everything in the bags so they make personal checks for drugs.

“We haven’t found anything today in this type of check. But yesterday, we confiscated 10 suitcases of cocaine destined for Mexico,” a young guardsman told me.

“You know,” he continued, “we confiscate and capture thousands of kilos every year and burn them—mostly cocaine, but also some heroin and marijuana. I wonder what President Bush would think if he knew how hard we work at stopping drug trafficking, almost all of which originates in Colombia not in our country.”

Drug free, we were boarding the plane but not before we were patted down at the entrance. Fortunately, I had put Diego’s advice into practice. I would not buy a commercial deodorant with which to swathe my armpits but I did apply a blend of lime juice and sodium carbonate, something Diego’s mother used long ago. So I did not offend the nostrils of the guards when I raised my left arm, clenched my fist and shouted the new sound of Venezuela: No volverán, meaning the Empire and Oligarchy will not return.

Read Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.

In La Victoria, 20 houses are centers for this program. There are 6000 such houses in the country. Housewives volunteer their time and kitchens to make the lunches.

Another connected alimentation plan is in place in public school, currently feeding 60% of all students. Students and teachers eat nutritious meals together, which are prepared locally. Any leftovers are given out the same day to needy persons, including homeless. Diego had recently given me a leftover lunch from his lover’s school. It consisted of paella: chicken and rice, with olives and red peppers; beets and two pieces of bread. Sumptuous!

At town hall’s center, about 80 assembled to celebrate the Communist party 77th anniversary. I read their “Red Letter” leaflet printed in red ink for the occasion.

It clearly supports the Chavez-led Bolivarian Revolution and warns that imperialism, the final phase of capitalism, threatens the revolution as it does all people’s struggle for improvement, for liberation and sovereignty. The leaflet is written in common language and speaks to people’s discontent with local governments backing Chavez, including La Victoria, for failure “to accomplish the expectations generated by its electors”.

The experienced Communist party also calls upon Chavez party forces to align with it in forming a National Anti-Imperialist Front (FNAI), thus broadening the struggle against US imperialism’s real threats from abroad and internally.

Oscar Figuera stood at the podium. Short mulatto with stubby black-gray beard, he is the party’s secretary-general and a deputy from Aragua state in the parliament, one of eight Communists elected in 2005. In the 2006 presidential elections, the PCV received nearly three percent of the national vote, making it the nation’s fourth largest. It added its 342,000 votes to the Chavez Patriotic Alliance for a total of 7.3 million votes. All but 15 of the 167 National Assembly members support the Chavez-led process.

I quote from some of Figuera’s comments.

“Thousands of us Communists have shed our blood on this earth to make a better world, to create socialism. We stand beside President Chavez today…We support the PSUV and we don’t want any of them to leave it for our party, which we must maintain to guide us toward socialism. If PSUV socialists left the party, it would leave its right-wing with greater influence. But we want our parties, and other radical ones, to increase the strength of the Patriotic Alliance, and to join us in creating a massive FNAI.”

There was strong applause when Figuera spoke in support of FARC, which he said the PCV viewed as a legitimate force and a strategic ally. “We don’t condemn the armed struggle as a form of struggle against a state that closes the democratic process.”

Chavez had ceased criticizing the PCV for not merging into the PSUV, which had been his position. The PSUV had recently rejoined the shaky Patriotic Alliance, which also included the Party for All (Partido Para Todos), a second generation split off from the PCV. But, in July 2008, once Chavez had called upon FARC to dissolve and inexplicably invited Uribe to Caracas as a friend, the PCV exercised its political principles by conducting street demonstrations against the narco-trafficking, para-militarist Uribe. Chavez rebuked the PCV for this, something many Chavez supporters considered ingenuous.

When Figuera ended his speech, I spoke with Murillo Baez. At 73, he’d been a member of the PCV for 47 years. He had witnessed an act of carnality committed by Latin America’s most infamous terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles.

“Yeah, Bambi Carriles, as we knew him. He was the worst,” the gray-haired black man drawled, remembering the living nightmare. “I read he’s still a terrorist running loose in Miami with the rest of them. And Bush says those who assist terrorists are terrorists!”

“It was in late 1960s. Carriles was a high official in Venezuela’s secret police, the dreaded DISIP. Another right-wing Cuban exile working with the CIA was DISIP chief for some years [Orlando García Vázquez]. I don’t know if Leoni Otero or Caldera Rodríguez was president. It didn’t matter, really. They were all under the US government, and their secret police was run by the CIA with gusano agents [Cuban right-wing exiles].

“Our party was prohibited and many were in the mountains. I was the president of the local CTA union and was in our office in La Victoria when we heard the screams and shots. Some unionists and underground comrades were meeting up the block. Somebody must have tipped off the DISIP. Carriles led the murder of 10 people. Some were ripped up. One pregnant woman gave birth under the attack. They burned the baby with cigarette butts. We couldn’t do anything. We had no weapons and the secret police were well armed.”

As Baez and I spoke, Carriles was a free man walking the streets in Miami where he would soon be honored, on May 7th, by 500 fellow Cuban Americans. He had been released a year before from a Texas jail cell when a Bush-appointed federal judge dismissed the only charge against him—making false statements to immigration officials. He came to the United States illegally after being pardoned in Panama, in 2004, by Bush-friendly President Mireya Moscoso. He had been captured in 2000; tried and sentenced for attempted assassination of President Fidel Castro when he was to deliver a speech to students in Panama. The Panama Supreme Court recently ruled that pardon unconstitutional.

The United States Attorney General refuses to even answer Venezuela’s request for Carriles’ extradition, thus abrogating the mutually signed extradition treaty. Carriles is wanted as a fugitive from one of the worst acts of terrorism: the bombing of a Cuban airliner, October 6, 1976, in which all 73 passengers and crew were killed. It was the first political air terrorism “hit” in the Americas. Released FBI archives show that Carriles had informed his Washington DC handler that an upcoming “hit” would occur against a Cuban airliner.

Luis Posada Carriles is good friends with the rich and powerful in Miami and with Florida’s governor, Jeb Bush. Among his most powerful associates is co-master mind of the 1976 bombing, Orlando Bosch, also a free man living in Miami. Both had been imprisoned in Venezuela for their role in the airline bombing, but the CIA assisted their escape in the mid-1980s. Another powerful ally was former CIA agent Jorge Mas Canosa, now deceased. He became wealthy in related economic activity as a CIA agent. After his part in the Bay of Pigs invasion, he founded the Cuban-American National Foundation. CANF helped finance many acts of terrorism both within the US and in Cuba. Among them were explosions at tourist hotels in Cuba and bombing plans against museums. Carriles bragged to the “New York Times” (July 12-13, 1998) about these acts of terrorism, in which one man was killed and 11 wounded.

Cuba was concerned about this sabotage. Not only was it lethal, it injured their primary income. Leaders believed (strangely) that the FBI might be interested in cooperating to stop the terrorists in Miami. Over 300 acts of sabotage and assassinations had been committed inside the United States by these terrorist groups since 1959 when Cuban exiles began operating there. Cuba had experienced thousands of terrorist acts, which had killed more than 3000 of their people and seriously wounded nearly as many. To defend their country, Cuban intelligence agents had infiltrated these circles over many years. (See my book about 27 of them: Backfire: The CIA’s Biggest Burn, published, in 1991, by Editorial José Martí, Havana: www.ronridenour.com). Just in the years 1990 to 1998, 170 planned acts of sabotage and assassinations had been prevented by these brave men and women, among them were: Gerardo Hernández, Ramon Labanino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González and René González.

The Cuban 5: Ramon, Gerardo, Fernando, Antonio, and Rene

In June 1998, the FBI was invited to Havana where they were given copies of Cuban intelligence documents in the hope the FBI would keep its promise to put a stop this terror. As Fidel later said, some of the material given included, “14 phone conversations from Luis Posada Carriles in which he provided information about terrorist attacks on Cuba. Information was provided on how to locate Posada…”

The FBI did study the material and was able to ascertain how Cuba had acquired such valuable knowledge. On September 12, 1998, the FBI arrested a dozen Cuban agents who were informing Cuban authorities about plans of terrorism against it. Five of them (named above) were sent to isolation cells for 17 months and then sentenced on “conspiracy against national security” charges to a total of four life terms plus 75 years. The Cuban Five pointed out in defense that they were only monitored the actions of Miami-based terrorist groups, in order to prevent terrorism against their country.

The PCV participates in an expanding international campaign to free the Cuban Five while demanding that the US government honor its own extradition treaty with Venezuela and return the convicted terrorist/mass murderer Luis Posada Carriles to Venezuela for completion of his prison term.

The Cuban Five’s are not terrorists, and their actions were never directed at the U.S. government; they never harmed anyone nor had weapons while in the United States. The only crime they committed was to operate as agents of a foreign government without having registered, for which one can be imprisoned for one to three years. They are still in prison ten years later simply because they acted to defend their homeland against US-baked terrorism.

Read Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9.

Chavez recounted phone conversations he had during the night of March 1st with Ecuador President Rafael Correa, whose land had just been invaded by Colombian troops, pilots and police. Their objective was not Ecuador itself but an encampment of FARC guerrillas located two kilometers inside northern Ecuador.

Raul Reyes, FARC’s second in command, and twenty-four other guerrillas were murdered, many in cold blood. Among those murdered was Olga Marin, Reyes companion and the daughter of Manuel Marulanda, FARC’s founder and leader for 40 years. The guerrillas had not been able to resist, because they were asleep, later found in their underwear, when attacked by planes from the US base Manta in Ecuador, which dropped five “smart bombs”, followed by helicopters flying in from the south of Colombia. Several of them were shot in cold blood directly in the back of the head or face as was the case with Reyes and Julián Conrado, the only cadavers taken to Colombia in a police helicopter. The other persons were found by Ecuadoran troops in the coming hours. Three wounded persons, who were able to hide, were found and gave eye-witness testimony to their rescuers and to an OAS (Organization of American States) investigation team, which later came to the area. Among the dead and wounded were five Mexican students, who were not guerrillas.

President Chavez told the nation that Uribe had lied about the operation to Correa, whom he telephoned after its “success”, as Uribe viewed the blood bath.

“Uribe is a lying lackey of the US Empire, a mafiosa, a criminal supporting para-militarist assassins and a narco-trafficker. He doesn’t want peace.”

[Uribe did nothing to aid the process of returning four captured Colombian congresspersons, which FARC had unilaterally released just two days before this horrible massacre.]

“Uribe operates in the style of Israel, converting Colombia into the key arm of US interests in Latin America just as Israel is in the Middle East.”

“We won’t tolerate this and we must protect our borders against this satellite. Correa has broken diplomatic relations and moved troops to the border. Correa can count on us. Generals, send ten battalions with tanks and aircraft to our border with Colombia!”

In the upcoming investigations by Ecuador, Venezuela and OAS we learned that Operation Phoenix, as the Uribe-US plan was named, used technology not possessed by any Latin America country and which had disclosed where Reyes group was hiding. Army and police units from Colombia cooperated with Ranger army units of the United States operating out of its Manta base. Manta had been used during eight years against Colombian peasants and their armed forces, FARC, as part of the billion dollar-a-year Plan Colombia extermination operation. At least 50,000 Colombians—mostly civilians—had been killed in Plan Colombia’s eight-year operation. And 300,000 had been forced to flee their homes into the welcoming arms of Venezuela. They live there with the same rights and benefits as citizens, just as do all three million Colombian immigrants.

President Correa declared that he will not renew the Manta contract at the end of 2008.

In these days, I witnessed intense concern in La Victoria about a possible war, a subject that embraced everyone across the nation. Just after Chavez’ announcement of cutting diplomatic relations with Colombia and sending troops to the border, I heard my next door neighbors yelling, “Who wants war? Chavez that’s who. It was Ecuador that Uribe violated not Venezuela. Then why mess in it?”

My neighbor across the Plaza Ricaurte park told me, “I support Chavez 100%. I’m ready to die for the fatherland. But I’m tired, tired of the oligarchy, the corruption within the Chavez government, tired of all the waiting. I want it all to end. It’d be better to declare war and get it over with.”

This park contained many opinions. There were those who applauded Chavez’ action and hoped it would prevent Bush-Uribe from testing Venezuela’s will to defend its revolution by sending provocative bullets across the long border, not possible to close off entirely. Then there were the young men with fancy cars and motor cycles who could care less about anything else. As one neighbor described them, “They play with life and wait for capitalism to return in full.”

Both Chavez and Correa had been patient, too patient many militant revolutionaries maintained, with Bush-Uribe provocations. Chavez reminded us of occasions when Colombian soldiers and para-militarists had been captured on Venezuelan soil. They were preparing sabotage and murder, hoping to start a war. Para-militarists sold drugs and pistols to young inane gangsters, hoping to destabilize the government. After some arrests and a short time in prison, Chavez had agreed with Uribe to return them to Colombia. Correa told the world that he had been patient with Uribe too. His troops has found several small FARC camps and turned them away. Colombian soldiers had crossed into Ecuador five times between February 2007 and January 2008. And now this massacre.

During this tense week, Uribe’s generals claimed they had found three computers among Reyes possessions. Miraculously, they were the only material left untouched by the “smart bombs”, and they allegedly showed that Chavez had financed FARC with $30 million. They also claimed that Correa’s people were cooperating and trading with FARC. Correa answered that his emissaries, and Chavez’, were on the verge of accomplishing final negotiations for the number one held prisoner, Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt. Chavez had served as the principle international negotiator in the two prisoner releases by FARC. These seven released prisoners, and Betancourt’s mother, all praised Chavez for his humanitarian efforts on television.

Meanwhile in Bogota, the cadaver of Reyes was placed on public display. A newspaper photograph showed a boy hitting his hanging body with a bat while his father stood proudly behind him.

VEA newspaper ran a photograph of a Coca-Cola worker in Venezuela wearing a t-shirt with the words: Don’t Drink Coca-Cola. Although there is no grassroots boycott of Coca-Cola in Venezuela, as there is in Colombia, India, USA, UK and other lands, there is general knowledge that Coca-Cola companies inside Colombia pay death squads to murder workers who try to organize a union, struggling for decent conditions. In fact, Coca-Cola is on trial in Miami for doing just that: murder. Chiquita banana had to pay a $25 million fine for hiring death squads to murder its workers in Colombia. No one went to prison, of course. And Bush-Uribe talk of democracy, accusing Chavez and Correa of financing and cooperating FARC, which the Coca-Cola/Chiquita bosses and their politicians contend are “terrorists.” The devil claims God is the devil.

It is an Alice in Wonderland world we live in!

Just as the Venezuelan troops had settled in at the border, Chavez ordered them home. A week had gone by since the massacre in Ecuador. OAS had met about the conflict and so had the 20-nation member Rio Group. Even before OAS’ investigation was completed, these bodies expressed unanimous agreement that what Uribe did was wrong. They simply needed to read aloud what is written in all the agreements of these bodies, the United Nations and all other international agreements. It is unlawful for any nation to invade another without the agreement of international bodies, namely the UN or OAS, or if not acting in defense of an armed attack by forces of another government.

Uribe said he was sorry and wouldn’t do it again.

Chavez called this a great victory for all of Latin America and a great defeat for the US Empire. Fidel did the same in his written reflections. Correa was a bit less optimistic and somewhat taken aback when he saw Chavez embrace the “lying, murderous, criminal…” and then call Uribe to be his “brother” and “friend” a week later.

As the media was proclaiming that calm had returned, another leader of FARC was murdered, this time by a compatriot hired by the Colombian army. Pablo Montova turned on his leader, Iván Rios, killing him and his female companion and then cutting off one of Rios’ hands, which he turned over to the army as proof of his ugly deed. He was to receive $2.6 million for these murders, and the security, according to him, that the army would not murder him and his female companion. Although the death penalty is legally prohibited in Colombia, the government fulfilled its promise of paying the hired killer.

This occurred at the same time that unionists in Colombia and progressives conducted a peaceful march in Bogotá. They sought an end to the internal war and the corrupt Uribe government. Dozens of Uribe’s staff and ministers, connected to narco cartels and para-militarists, had been condemned and even sentenced to prison by a sometimes independent attorney general and Supreme Court. Within three days of this march, three unionist leaders of the protest were murdered, and one had been tortured prior to death.

In the middle of March, Marulanda died of a heart attack. FARC did not announce this, however, for two months. Half of FARC’s seven-man leadership was now dead. It had lost several thousands of its 17-20,000

The brave of FARC is everyone

It is an Alice in Wonderland world we live in!

Read Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8.

In Las Mercedes district, where I lived, nearly 100 members of five CCs gathered at a local hall. A large majority were women, mostly 40 years old and over. They met to consolidate their social organizing and take a position on a structural change proposal. Direct participation had allowed each CC to take individual directions but this was leading to a bit of chaos: differences in how to use resources, what programs took priority, which CC should house the local bank that distributes the funds allocated for community councils. Most of these funds come from the federal government, some from municipalities. These authorities were proposing that the structure be changed to accommodate a bit of centralization and control, which could lead to greater effectiveness.

I was surprised and impressed with how people openly complained about the failure of the municipal government to disseminate adequate information and provide basic training for community leadership and organizers, and about how people’s admiration for Chavez did not hinder several in objecting to the new proposal. A few rose in opposition to the mancomunidades proposal, which would bring several CCs inside an umbrella body that would work with authorities from “above” the individual CCs, as some viewed this.

“There is nothing in the law under which community councils operate that mandates such a direction,” said one opponent. “On the contrary, it speaks of direct power, and resources going directly to each council. Some of the municipal advisors are saying things here that is not the law, nor what Chavez has said.”

Another man spoke sharply from the podium:

“We lack training. We lack information from our local leaders. Some do not know how to manage administratively, either our projects or the moneys allocated. Too many of us are still driven by egoism. We have to learn how to motivate our councils, the spokespersons and our neighbors.”

The issue of where the bank administering CC funds should be located led to a hefty debate. The majority wished to move it from the CC where it was, because that council was not active and there was suspicion that the funds were not well utilized. Representatives from one council said the money they should have received was not forthcoming.

Solutions to these matters would be decided upon at another round of meetings and after street debate.

That evening I attended a local PSUV meeting. The main topic was the current round of CC meetings and the issue of mancomunidades. The general attitude among these one dozen members, mostly over 45 years old, was that “a small group tried to sabotage the assembly”, as the chairman characterized the protest. Not all were caught up in heavy-handed terminology and limited condemnations, and some saw the need to struggle internally to solve significant problems not being addressed by their local government. Among those was the lack of caring and adequate medical treatment at the hospital, which was raised by a retired doctor who volunteers at the local hospital.

After the meeting, five of us went to a café to imbibe in national brews. They asked my opinion on a variety of issues, and what did I see as the number one problem within the revolutionary process. I hesitated to render conclusions after such a short time observing, but they insisted. My spontaneous answer was: the lack of follow through.

Everyone agreed. Example after example plopped onto the wobbly table. I presented one and asked their opinion about the cause. I recalled what a young taxi driver had told me. As a supporter of the Chavez government, Gabriel had applied to take a Francisco Miranda course in Cuba. The idea behind this mission is to create a civilian cadre, which would form a military reserve for defense. The volunteers were often sent to Cuba to acquire a political understanding of revolution and some discipline. So far about 3000 had participated. My driver told me that when he returned from three months “enjoying the generous hospitality of Cubans, not the least the women”, there was nothing to incorporate into, there was no follow up at home. What little he considered he had learned in the brother nation he had forgotten with disuse. Gabriel was so disgruntled he said he would not vote for Rosa León again, albeit mayors have nothing to do with this mission.

Yes, that was all too familiar, the PSUV activists replied. “Lack of infrastructure; most people look after self-interests; some generals don’t want an independent militia; too much talk-not enough action.”

I encountered the same problem with the voceros. At the weekly meeting for all spokespersons of the more than 100 CCs, 17 showed up. They spoke about problems in advancing some projects, about too many activists meeting late or abstaining, problems balancing family, a job and volunteer work. One of the agenda items was an invitation for me to hold a lecture-seminar about communication, how to better reach people in the neighborhoods.

Many spoke enthusiastically about the need for learning. I could also offer advice about a newsletter soon to be launched. Agreement was reached on a day session with lunch and a date set. I prepared for this important initiative. I heard nothing in the week to come. The day before the event, I phoned the municipality’s paid coordinator of the voceros. Oh, he said evenly, no one arranged anything. He did not understand my disappointment and dismay of the frivolous manner of unfulfilling decisions.

Why is making a revolution so difficult?

Ah, imagine your neighbor Sarah. She gets her news from the national and international corporate media. She does what pleases her. If she doesn’t see the fun in doing something she doesn’t do anything. Yeah, we know a lot like her. It might even ring a bell inside. So, what does it take to have Sarah change into a person who wants to cooperate with many others, taking her time, using her energy to create something new, something great for everybody, if everybody works at it? Just what are the tools we need—mental and spiritual as well as physical and emotional ones—and how do we develop them? That is not so easy to conceive let alone practice and transform society in a few years, right?

Already, through the energy generated by the mass behind the committed leadership, wonders have been created. Alongside those I’ve portrayed earlier in these writings, is an essential and historical one. Vicente Vallenilla, the Venezuelan ambassador to Denmark, told me before I departed for his homeland:

“We say that what is happening now is real sovereignty, and for the first time in our history. We are taking our natural resources into our own hands. We are transforming from the sole objective of profit-making for a few to greater distribution of the wealth, commonly created, replacing the raw materialism of today with a more spiritual life tomorrow, one of sovereignty and independence, of wholeness in fellowship and, thus, happiness.”

Read Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.

I was exhilarated with the first steps up a dirt path. Trees surrounded us. We were alone for six hours of climbing up and down much of the mountain. There were a few wooden houses scattered on the side of the path wide enough for a car, only one of which we saw. Although quite isolated, these houses enjoyed running water from a mountain stream and electricity brought in by the government.

We passed a coffee plantation no longer being cared for. Carlos explained that the owner spent most of his time in Spain, his birth place, and neglected the farm. Apparently there wasn’t enough profit in it.

We stopped to eat a lunch we brought and I swam in a pool of the stream. We chatted while listening to the guacharaca, the only sounds we heard, apart from the eternally rolling stream. We enjoyed listening to the chattering, social tree-dwellers, which feed on abundant seeds and fruits found here. Carlos told me he taught mathematics at the local technical college while his wife taught in Maracay’s Mission Sucre. They saw each other only on the weekends. He supported Chavez and the grass roots revolution but was discouraged by so much inefficiency and corruption. Like many other intellectual workers, he remained on the sidelines although he voted for the process.

When we reached the bottom of the mountain, we walked another kilometer to Juan Luis’ “summer house”, delicately resting on an incline and partially hidden by skinny trees. He and his girl friend come to this rustic place most weekends. While Juan Luis and his lover prepared seafood snacks, a neighbor boy, who watches over their place and a handful of chickens, made coffee a lá fagón—fireplace style—which tasted especially stimulating after 25 kilometers walking in thin tennis shoes.

Carlos and I planned another trip soon. I spent the next days learning, looking forward to our next trip, this time to the very top.

Atop this 2000 meter mountain sits a unique town, Colonia Tovar. The 3,500-hectare area was settled by German farmers from Bavaria, in 1843. To this day, the well-maintained, colorfully painted buildings have Bavarian characteristics. The town is unusually clean and quiet, reflecting a European life style albeit none of the 6,000 residents are actually German, and nearly no one even speaks German.

We had climbed seven hours straight up. We passed the abandoned coffee farm, then some fruit trees cared for by a lone farmer, and stopped at a cluster of houses served by one little store. It was crammed with cartons of Yankee products: Colgate, Nestle, Toms, and, of course, Coca-Cola. The Colombian store-keeper was unaware of the boycott against the Death Squads’ Drink. Carlos’ young cousin was with us this time; he deferred to my request and drank a national soda instead of the all time favorite sugar drink.

We pushed onward and upward. I was surprised how well I—a smoker—kept up with a man in his mid-40s and another in his mid-20s, but the going was tough. Our legs were never planted straight, always stretching at an incline, sometimes required to jump onto rocks laid across the stream, which frequently criss-crossed our path.

As we neared the top, we saw small plots of land planted in strawberries, potatoes, coffee and peaches. Carlos wished to visit one such farm. As part of an education mission for which he had volunteered, he had once taught a girl who lived here. We soon found the house, quite unmistakable for its handsome and solid even stately character.

Pedro and his wife are the owners. His grandfather had built the two-story house and it was long ago paid for. His two teenage daughters, one had been Carlos’s student, also live here. Pedro showed us his 1.5-hectare farm. He was proud of his sweet-tasting peaches and strawberries, and nutritious potatoes. He and his family earned a decent living from this small farm. They had a jeep, two TVs, refrigerator, stove, washing machine, all the modern necessities. They ate some of their produce, including chickens and eggs, and sold the rest. They had enough money leftover to buy a CD or DVD from time to time. True, they had no rent and all the residents in this municipality get their water and electricity free. The house was clean, and decorated with flowers from the garden. It looked so different from the eye sore, dirty house I stayed in.

The family supports Chavez, as do the majority in this area, despite their German heritage and being private farmers. How one man, with family help at peak times, can till just one-and-one-half hectares of land on a steep incline, keeping it cleared of weeds, and earn enough for all they owned and not be in debt—while the two cooperatives I had visited were so far from nearing this accomplishment—is such a big question that I can’t enlighten anymore than I have: discipline, dedication, sense of ownership responsibility.

Once at the welcoming arch-gated entrance of Colonia Tovar, and despite our tiredness, we three men of three generations dashed for the tavern selling its own brew, a lá Bavarian. Cool, light, distinguished taste. The tavern blended the cleanliness and order of Germany, the flowers and warmth of Venezuela. Unfortunately, we had only time for two of their local brew. After the day’s trek, we weren’t about to walk down the mountain. The last bus to town left at 16:00, so we had to rush.

Read Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Carocote is a mountain range area previously owned by the same Vollmer family. This 390 hectare area lay fallow in 2003 when one of the first land occupations took place. Forty-six families came from nearby towns of Sabaneta and Tasajera to claim the soil. And once again, Chavez intervened to accomplish the mission.

There is no level area here except a space bulldozed out for the 26 new houses finished a year ago. Only 25 families remain; the others left because of no housing facilities and lack of income. Five of those families which left, however, built their own ramshackle houses at the very top of this mountain range and grow their own crops. I was told that they do better than the cooperative. The National Institute of Land (INT), which oversees Mission Zamora, still considers them part of the mission and assists them with credits and equipment, showing quite a bit of flexibility for a “dictatorial” government, as the right-wing opposition and Yankees refer to it.

Nancy, one of the five elected cooperative leaders, took me to the empty house used for visitors. The houses here are just like those at Quebrada Seca. As I was arranging my bunk bed, I found stacks of information pamphlets promoting the constitutional reform referendum voted on last December. It would have qualitatively improved the rights, benefits and power of the poor and working class, but it failed to pass by one percent of the vote. The greatest disappointment was the failure of three million voters, who had voted for Chavez as president, to go to the polls. They were a large part of the 44% abstention. Chavez forces engaged in internal analysis and self-criticism. One of the main reasons for its failure was the lack of organizing for it — too few doors knocked on. And here before me was evidence: many hundreds undelivered, unused pamphlets.

Two Cuban advisors lived next door to the visitor’s house. With typical Cuban hospitality, Rudys immediately invited me into his house and asked if I had had lunch. He fed me leftovers from his Cuban prepared lunch of black beans, rice, yucca and a bit of meat. Rudys was eager to speak with me as he had seen the “contra golpe” TV interview and knew I had lived in Cuba.

Rudys had taken a three-year agriculture education in his home province of Pinar del Rio, north of La Habana. He’d been at Carocote 16 months and would be here for two years. The advisors get a vacation in Cuba at mid-term. Rudys was glad to be helping Cuba’s good neighbor Venezuela. He was also concerned about the great degree of thievery and insecurity that people experience. This must contribute to the fact that few Venezuelans invite people inside their houses. Despite the close cooperation these families experience here everyone locked their doors. I was told they did not have internal thievery but people from the town sometimes come looking for something to steal. Just the week before, someone had set fire to dry grass on a hillside, which burned some trees, but the residents were able to put it out before it attacked their young crops.

I hooked up with Nancy and part of her team, one of six. Two members were not present. The coop’s president, Nancy’s husband, was in Cuba for a two-week training course. On the way to their plot of carrots, a 20-minute walk, we passed seven long nurseries. They were well built steel structures. Nancy explained that they would be used for tomatoes and other vegetables but were just short of being completed.

“We should have had them functioning by now, but one big problem is that our motor pump was stolen.”

The carrot patch was near the end of the cultivatable area. Like the other crops, all the rows are dug on hillsides, making sowing, cultivating and harvesting quite difficult and even painstaking. The terrain here does not allow for tractors. Most of the weeds had to be pulled up by hand, if one wanted to take up the roots. But the others used hoes to cut them above the roots. There were far more weeds than carrot plants. In the two and one-half hours we worked—instead of the designated four—I cleaned four rows, revealing very few carrots. In some places plants were two even three meters apart. Most of this crop had already been lost to weeds. I had done this work when I lived in Cuba and know that it is not a welcome task but this was below par.

I asked Nancy why there were so many weeds and why the team didn’t have seeds with them to sow where carrot plants had been choked. She was embarrassed by my questions, admitting that she should have thought of bringing seeds. “Next time.”

Ricardo, the other Cuban advisor, later told me: “The most important thing for farmers is consciousness, not the back. If they cultivated more often, it would be easier to work the hoe and there would be more plants.”

In the evening, I had a long conversation with another neighbor, Luis, who gave me an overall view of their history.

“In the beginning, most of us still worked for wages nearby. Some of us built make-shift living quarters while we were here preparing the earth. Just clearing the earth and irrigating by hand took us three years, and there was the dispute about ownership too. It wasn’t until 2006 that we began to be full-time farmers. And INT gave us a 200BF monthly stipend to make ends meet. That was terminated this year in the hope—and with gentle pressure—that we will produce enough to pay ourselves.

“Although about 50 hectares are cultivable, we only have 10 or 11 in seed. We will soon have 15 hectares planted. The majority of our crops are vegetables, some potatoes, a few herbs, and a couple hectares in plantain and cambur”—the Venezuelan banana.

“Unfortunately, we have not yet begun ecological farming methods, but we hope to.”

“Each crop takes between three and six months from seed to maturity, so we are harvesting and selling several times a year. Our teams are economically independent from one another and sell on the local markets, especially to Mercal.

“We decide what we will grow but INT helps us with earth analysis, and the mission’s principle is based on producing necessary products at low costs and prices. We undercut the speculating supermarkets and the big plantation owners who hoard products.”

Luis’s wife, Juanita, is one of the adults who do not work the land but work in the home and take major responsibility for the children. Had the December 2007 referendum passed, she like all housewives would have received a government wage for that work.

“Our lives have improved so much,” Juanita said softly with a smile as she joined us.

“Chavez has accomplished so many good things. I am so proud to be Venezuelan now. But there are people who accuse our president of being responsible for all that is not good, for all that goes wrong. Some say he robs. What a lie that is. The truth is that the opposition is the thief; the rich are thieves. And everybody knows that all previous presidents were thieves, so some people just assume that Chavez is as well.”

Guacharaca, a turkey-like wild bird living n mountains and high land cooperatives. Farmers hunt them for their rich meat.

Early next morning, after a hearty breakfast at home, I went to find a team to work with. None were about. Everyone was at home. I took a stroll over the hillside passed a plot of young plants and down to the stream that crossed the mountain. I climbed up its bank under tall trees. The gentle rolling sound was suddenly overcome by a chattering flock of guacharaca. These turkey-sized birds cackle similarly as well yet fly more like predators. Locals hunt them for their red meat. Once they settled, another sound crashed into my ears from upstream. I followed its call to the foot of a waterfall cascading ten meters into an inviting pool. Stripped in a flash, I dived into the blue paradise. After a refreshing swim, I crawled upon a large warm rock. Bathing in the sun, one of the world’s greatest waterfalls sparkled behind my closed eyes. Venezuela harbors Angel Falls, or Kerepakupai merú. At 979 meters, it is the planet’s highest free-falling waterfall.

After a leisurely early swim and sun-bath, I returned to the residential compound and found Enrique sitting contemplatively on his porch.

Enrique is, at 57 years of age, a new farmer. A former petroleum worker, he had worked his way up to production chief for a large oil company. Workers tripled production during his time as chief but they received none of the extra profits. Enrique took the issue up.

“You know what the owners’ bosses did? They fired me. It didn’t matter to them that I was an excellent foreman for them. What mattered is that I crossed the line to speak up on behalf of their productive workers. In their eyes, this was treason. It was then that I became a determined follower of Hugo Chavez.”

Enrique was an initiator of the cooperative. He looks upon his present life optimistically. He views the future as one in which the poor and the conscious working class of the Third World take the offensive against a decaying capitalism.

“It will not be far away when an explosive crisis will bring much of the working class within the rich lands on the side of their historic brothers and sisters around the world.

“Today, I live for our fellowship, our common life. I now earn about 5,000BF a year instead of 36,000 but I am a happy man. My children bloom with free education and health care, and we all live tranquilly.”

But Enrique is not naïve or fundamentalist.

“We still live as egoists in this land. We still are affected by the capitalist disease, greed. Our consciousness still lacks power.”

Enrique wanted to talk about Barak Obama.

“Obama could be the alternative man for capitalism-imperialism for three to four years. He won’t do much for the poor and workers. He’d be a good trading man for big capitalism. He can talk better with Third World rich leaders, blacks, Arabs, Latin Americans. But he’d disappoint many of his hopeful, idealistic followers. Maybe this would bring about a greater awareness of the real nature of capitalism-imperialism, no matter the spokesman’s color or gender, and maybe a radicalization would take off.”

I left this homegrown polilogue and headed home. I passed a group of boys playing soccer. During a pause, I asked them how they felt living here. All of them expressed contentment. No worries; plenty to eat; transport to a school where they thrived. Good Cuban doctors in town.

My third day at Carocote was a rest day, Sunday, so I would return to La Victoria. But first, I wanted to talk with the oldest cooperativist. At 68, Pedro is a happy man with eight children and eight grandchildren—or is it six, mused the gray-haired black man.

“My memory fails me. But I remember how it was living here as a child. I was born in this same area. There was nothing. None of the governments before Chavez did anything for the poor, and we were the vast majority. We lived in tin-covered straw sheds with no water or electricity. We couldn’t go to school. Nobody knew how to read or write. We grew corn. Coño how things have changed since Chavez! Look at this house I have. My wife’s in town where we also have a room. She’s sick and can’t get about. She gets what care can be given, and it’s the Cuban doctors who are caring for her.

“Now we have land and houses. I plant cambur y ocumo. I hope Chavez continues leading and goes the way of Fidel. The bad ones, those who have the money, don’t want him. The President is with the people.”

Yeah, Pedro told it like it is! The man with the big heart, a man who came from their roots, the brave one standing up against Goliath—this is a leader!

Read Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

The upper classes complain that the Chavez government has limited the number of vehicle imports, although in the two previous years 600,000 private cars were imported. The government seeks to diminish importation and increase national production in all areas. It already produces many of its military vehicles and tractors, and it has just begun to produce its own cars for private sales in a joint venture with Iran. The “People’s Car” will sell for a modest $7,000—new imported cars sell for four times that at a minimum. The first 20,000 cars are planned to role off the assembly line in 2009. Furthermore, the millions of Venezuelan drivers are privileged to have what must be the world’s cheapest fuel. While a liter of bottled water costs the equivalent of $1.40, the now nationalized gasoline costs about $.04 cents (100 centavos in national currency) a liter, or $.15 cents a gallon, which is 35 to 45 times less the price of gasoline in the warring-for-oil United States.

Early one morning in February, Diego borrowed his girl friend’s car and drove me to a low mountain range where Quebrada Seca’s farm cooperative is located. He told me some of its history, and I had done some research.

I had read Central Bank figures, which show that the government had increased financing of agricultural production by 738% between 2004 and 2007. About five million of the nation’s 30 million hectares of cultivable land have been expropriated and turned over to about 200,000 people, most of them not farmers. In many cases, the very land titles have been contested. Some lands had simply been seized decades or hundreds of years ago by those with great local power and weaponry.

The Chavez government inherited a “one-crop” economy based on oil, mostly owned by US and British companies. In 1935, 60% of the work force was rural, mostly in agriculture. By 2000, only 12% of the population was rural. In 1998, only 6% of GNP came from agricultural production, the lowest rate in all of Latin America. And three-quarters of the land was held by five percent of landowners. Under Chavez food production has doubled but demand has also grown, even more than national supply. So it has been necessary to increase foodstuff imports, which come mainly from the new regional economic alliances, Mercosur and the Venezuela-Cuba ALBA initiative and now four more member nations.

The fact that the government has several times increased wages and pensions dramatically is a major cause for the increase in demand and consumption. On worker’s day, May 1, 2008, Chavez announced that the minimum monthly wage and minimum pension is to be the equivalent of $560, placing Venezuelans minimum incomes 2.6 times higher than the entire continent average.

Diego told me that, three years ago, about 150 people occupied this mountainous area of 1000 hectares owned by a wealthy German family. The Vollmers had long ago immigrated to Venezuela and became the largest agro-landowners in Aragua state. Like many wealthy plantation owners much of their land lay fallow. Who owns land and how it is used is fundamental to whether a society is based on capitalist market enterprise or socialist fellowship. And large private property owners have been the core power for hundreds of years before Chavez. His new national assembly passed a law allowing the government to expropriate idle land and redistribute it to landless peasants and other poor people. In October 2005, a comprehensive land reform was implemented with the name Mission Zamora. This occurred following President Chavez his first public speech advocating a socialist system. He did so at the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

“Everyday I become more convinced…that it is necessary to transcend capitalism. But capitalism can’t be transcended from within capitalism itself, but through socialism, true socialism, with equality and justice. But I’m also convinced that it is possible to do it under democracy, but not in the type of democracy being imposed from Washington,” he said.

“It is impossible within the framework of the capitalist system to solve the grave problems of poverty of the majority of the world’s population. We must transcend capitalism. But we cannot resort to state capitalism, which would be the same perversion as the Soviet Union. We must reclaim socialism as a thesis, a project and a path…a new type of socialism, a humanist one, which puts humans and not machines or the state ahead of everything. That’s the debate we must promote around the world…”

Diego introduced me to the cooperative’s secretary and one of the two Cuban advisors. With his recommendation, and my CV from eight years working in Cuba, I was warmly welcomed and permitted to go about the farm and speak with whom I wished. Diego drove back and I went on my own. At the entrance to the farm land stood a large billboard sign. It read (English translation):

“Quebrada Seca. Free Town. Agriculturally Productive People. Socialist Future.”

After two kilometers cross mainly brush land, I came across a coop team. Three women and one man were cultivating a plot. Juleen spoke for them.

“This year we’ve started a new work structure, hoping this will allow a surplus. Last year I was cultivating peppers and we lost the crop. We didn’t earn anything. The only way we’ve survived is due to a small annual stipend from the Ministry of Agriculture—which it stopped this year—plus credit for seed and farm tools. But now we plough the land with our bare nails, because our three tractors are broken down and we don’t have money for repairs. So, you ask, how do we eat?” chuckled chubby Juleen.

“We get help from our families who live and work in cities. And here we all help each other, we share what we have. Most families are headed by a man and a woman and one of them usually works outside on the weekends, at least one day a week. My husband and I alternate. He works at manual labor and I wash and iron clothes in Quebrada Seca. We each earn 30BF a day. We have no money for anything other than essentials, never for vacations, because then we work for cash in the town.”

It was nearly time for lunch so we starting the long walk up a steep hill toward the housing complex. Working hours are from 07:00 to 11:00, followed by a three-hour lunch break, and then back to work from 14:00 to 18:00. On the way up, the four new farmers spoke about their three-year history. When Mission Zamora started almost all the plantation owners protested expropriations. They went to court, which would tie up the question of land ownership for years.

In the last three years, Chavez has often intervened to convince landowners to release fallow lands, sometimes offering compromises so that peasants and relocated city folk could get started. That was the case here. The government offered assistance on long-term credit with low or no interest rates to start farming. This included new housing for those who stay on. The houses are about 80m², made of concrete and some wood, with tile roofs and floors. It usually takes up to a year to construct the houses in each cooperative and costs between 80,000 and 120,000BF to build. The first five years of residence is free. Once they reach the end of that time, a decision will be made about how much each cooperative family will pay. The objective is that full ownership is turned over to the families after 20 years.

“That’s the best thing about being here, our houses” garrulous Juleen said, beaming. “You’ll see.”

The new farmers explained that production relations have changed three times in so many years. First everyone worked as one collective but it was difficult to motivate all to work equally hard. Most had never tilled soil. The second year, they broke into ten teams of four to six each. Still it didn’t work. Now each team is independent and is responsible for its own economy. There are only 57 residents left, 25 farmers work in five teams. Seven of them have taken farming courses. In theory, thirty percent of the total cooperative’s income should go back into the coop to pay off state credits. Seventy percent is shared internally. However, since real production has been so low almost no payment on credits has been forthcoming. The government does not press them.

“We have technical assemblies each week. There’s one this afternoon. Here we plan and learn together. We used to haggle about who works well or not but there was no way to determine this objectively. Then we decided individual income on the basis of just showing up for work. That didn’t work either. Now each team has equal status, responsibility and income from proceeds. But, in reality, there is no income to divide. Yeah, we’ve sold what little we’ve produced to local markets, to Mercal, but it doesn’t make ends meet,” I’m told.

Mercal is a mission, which seeks to increase the country’s food sovereignty, providing access to quality produce, especially grains, dairy and meat at subsidized prices, averaging about 40% of the chaotic supply-demand system’s prices. From its initiation, in 2002, the items sold in local Mercals, usually located in private homes, has increased from just 15 elements to 400. The Ministry of Agriculture’s figures early this year indicate that 12 million people shop at Mercal’s 15,677 locations, meeting about 67% of the nation’s needs. The woman owner of the house where I stayed is coordinator of the local Mercal.

Twenty-seven new houses sit just under the peak of this mountain. They look like the 50 recently built in the local town and 10,000 more across the nation—a figure that lags behind the goal of building homes for everyone by 2021, which means more than one million. This project—Mission Hábitat—is part of the incentive for new farmers, and they are pleasant structures.

While Juleen and a neighbor woman prepare lunch for their families and me, I wonder about the fresh-smelling environment. The kitchen, which opens to a patio, has what is essential: refrigerator, gas stove, sink with drinkable water from nearby wells, cabinets and drawers. This house has two bedrooms and six beds. There’s an extra room. Two tiled bathrooms serve this family of six with shower and flush toilet. The living room has seating place for the entire family—sofa and two stuffed chairs—and there is a dinning room. The ceiling is high, about five meters, and wood-paneled. There are many windows and good ventilation. Everything is clean and shinny. Each house has a small yard area. Some grow a few vegetables and herbs. In the center of the complex is a playground with swings, slide and teeter-totter.

Juleen’s husband comes in. He is a bit shy but answers a couple of questions. The kitchen hardware came with the house; the furniture they bought on credit and some were gifts. They also have a radio. As yet there is no television signal or telephones.

After a great lunch of fruit, two vegetables, beans, pasta and chicken, we walk down to the main building where assemblies occur. On the way, Juleen complains that the children must walk to and from school an hour a day.

“Some cooperatives have mini-buses to transport children to school and adults to shop at markets, but we don’t. The future: I don’t know. We don’t work as much or as hard as we should. We have internal problems. We have a five-member executive committee elected every six months. They receive no money for this service and are workers too. Sounds good in theory but our first president stole money. We fired him but he still hasn’t been tried. Our new president spends little time here. He mostly confines himself to his own production of 500 chickens for eggs and meat. We buy much of his produce.”

Twenty farmers came to the assembly and a few children. An advisor from the ministry came to speak about the “green revolution”, combating plagues organically. A Cuban advisor spoke of Cuba’s success in this. They explained how they could get funguses and combative insects from government laboratories to replace costly insecticide sprays. Over time, production would increase in quality and quantity.

People listened attentively and asked questions. Suddenly the meeting was interrupted by a dog fight and subsequent laughter. The assembly ended with an account of what land was planted in what. Only about a fourth of the 100 cultivatable hectares were under seed.

I walked back to town for the bus, a bit down by what I had seen and heard. Making a “green revolution” with city folk is not a quick process, but it had started.

Read Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

CHUG CHUG CHUG
CHE CHE CHE

What! Is that right? Did I hear Che?

Coming out of a liturgical dream or awakened by revolutionary chanting, I throw off my sheet, pull on my kimona and rush downstairs and out the door into pitch black darkness. A booming united chant pulls me around the corner. The people are struggling in ardent enthusiasm for the cause. My legs move quickly now, taking me toward the ever-moving revolution. The chant surges and wanes in the wind.

Ron Stop! Now! You are running in the streets in a kimona. People will not understand this. The chanting is far away now and if you did catch up with the cantors what would you do and what would be their reaction to you? Can you be one with them, a gray-haired man in a blue kimona and sandals? They would be bewildered or insulted. No one will understand that you are driven with emotion hearing revolutionary chants.

I rush back as darkness begins to lighten. I pull on trousers and t-shirt and rush out again still in semi-darkness. The united voice fluctuates in volume. I’m reminded that these people are Catholic and some may be partaking in a sacred canticle. I see a man standing before a closed work center and ask him about the chanting. Does it have to do with evangelical spirits or the upcoming commemoration of the liberty of La Victoria, in 1814, by university and seminary students led by General José Félix Ribas?

“No,” he chuckles, “that’s just soldiers running their early morning exercises.”

Diego had earlier introduced me to a master sergeant at the military training base on the edge of town. The base was preparing a pageant of teenage girl beauties for “youth day”, part of the military-community solidarity policy. Diego’s friend’s daughter was a contender for “Queen of La Victoria”, and he invited me to attend. The evening following my crazy escapade, I entered the base plaza to see the show, feeling uneasy. Pretty girls sauntered about in high heels and white gowns, round buttocks vibrating, breasts pushed forward from low-cut necklines, they nervously caressed their long black hair. The audience milled about or sat on folding chairs, many drank Colombia’s Death Squads’ drink, Coca-Cola. Teenage boys and fathers watched the girls with pleasure and mothers smiled proudly.

Humans are filled with contradictions. Male-chauvinist inspired beauty contests continue to be popular. On the other hand, María León, president of the National Institute of Women, asserted, in an interview on Women’s Day: “This is the revolution of Women”. That same day, President Chavez announced a new Ministry of Women’s Affairs and named Ms. León its minister. She is unrelated to Rosa León, who was not even born when María took up arms alongside fellow members of the Communist Party against the oppressive regime of Rómulo Betancourt, in the 1960s.

By the summer of 2008, the new ministry had representation in most communities, helping the recently and newly created programs designed for women, including Banmujer—the world’s only government bank for women. It was established on Women’s Day in 2001 and has since granted small loans to two million women, mainly to help them in business ventures aimed at bringing them out of poverty and encourage participation in society. The ministry also has Meeting Points and Madres del Barrio. The “Mothers of the Barrio” Mission, started in March 2006, provides a monthly stipend (80% of the minimum wage) to poor women with children and who do not have full-time employment.

President Hugo Chávez announces María León as first minister of the new Ministry of Women’s Affairs.

Women suffrage arrived late in Venezuela, 1946. Not until constitutional changes in 1960 were women formally granted equality under the law. It wasn’t until the 1980s, though, that women were allowed to manage their own affairs, including signing official documents without the approval of a spouse or common law lover. Women began organizing for equal rights, in the 1970s, but most efforts were based on signal issues, such as the right to abort. There were few female public leaders before Chavez won the presidency. In the1997 National Assembly, for instance, only six percent of the deputies were women.

With Chavez’ 1998 electoral victory, a new constitutional campaign was initiated and with women’s rights at its core. Thousands of proposals were forthcoming by women’s organizations. The new constitution of December 15, 1999 is the first in the world written in a non-sexist language, meaning that both genders are used in referring to positions and titles, and it is known as the non-sexist Magna Carta, because of establishing full rights and benefits in all arenas. All forms of discrimination, also in the home, are forbidden.

In the first Chavez-led National Assembly women deputies doubled and have since tripled. Thirty-eight percent of the work force is female as are 56% of university graduates. Six women have earned the rank of general. Six of the 15-member executive committee of the new Socialist United Party of Venezuela are women. There are 11 female ministers, making up forty percent of the 29 ministries. And most spectacular is that four of the five highest public leaders are women. Standing beside executive leader Hugo Chavez, women are the President of the National Assembly, leaders of the National Electoral Council and Human Rights Office, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (TSJ).

Inspired by the current female Chief Justice, a judgeship on the Supreme Court is an aspiration held by Rose León. Although she, and presumably most if not all of the beauty queen contestants, seek equality and power this does not prevent them from continuing some traditional sexual roles and with pink frills. Rosa, for example, affords herself the luxury—or affectation—of having her own bathroom in the offices where dozens of mayoral employees work. There are two bathrooms but the workers and visitors must only use one. A sign on one door states that this one is exclusive for Rose. Unable to resist the temptation, I used it. I found the light on—something a cleaning woman insists upon so that Rosa does not need to switch it on—and the toilet seat covered in pink clothe; a pink hand towel hung beside the immaculately clean sink. Nothing was amiss except my presence, which the cleaning woman let me know in no unspoken terms when I came out.

Throughout my two months exploring the Venezuelan revolution everywhere I spoke with people working or organizing the majority were women. Black women are more often political activists and community organizers than black men as is the case for indigenous women, who represent or are active among the some 50 tribes in the country. They carry out Mission Guaicaipuro, the program to restore communal land titles and human rights for the half-million indigenous peoples.

I did not witness any brute macho treatment of women and most women accompanied by men did not look down or fear to speak up. In fact, women are most outspoken and many are not shy about showing other aspects of themselves, such as gyrating hips and breasts springing forth, a sight fair to this dirty old man.

But, yes, there is violence against women, especially in the homes. And there are rapes; prostitution too. Prostitutes are offered free tests for venereal diseases by local clinics.The courts do not prosecute prostitutes. Many judges are women. The new women’s affairs ministry addresses both violence against women and prostitution through information, conferences at the community Meeting Points and hotlines for women abused by men.

The Bolivarian Revolution is truly a transformation for women, an empowerment that half the population is not about to let disappear.

Read Parts 1, 2, and 3.

Palate and stomach satisfied with just one cachapa, I walked two blocks to the Cilento buildings where the Office of the Budget is located. I informed a secretary that the mayor had suggested I could come by to acquire a copy of the public document. Despite its public nature, she had to ask her boss who was not in. He told her over the phone that I had to go to the Office of the Municipality Council. On the bus, I listened to sing-song pleas for alms until stepping off in front of the government offices, an old colonial Spanish yellow building. Scores of people, many youths, walked about the spacious indoors or sat at desks wearing red or blue t-shirts with slogans for the Bolivarian Revolution. In one such office is one of the three existing copies of the budget, but before I could see it the municipal president had to approve and he was not in. I went to the public library.

“The mayor has not sent us one. We have never had a copy of the budget,” the head librarian told me. I looked up on the Internet but the municipality had no homepage. It took three days to catch up with the municipal secretary. He said my request was unusual and not easy to comply with given that there were so few copies. They couldn’t let theirs out of the office and it was not physically possible to copy several hundred pages. But I did glance through the tome. A secretary would copy the 20-page “general considerations” when she could buy ink for the printing machine. It took a week to get this summary. I have to conclude that, in fact, the public had no real access to their budget.

I could make out from the summary that the amount of funds transferred to “decentralized entities”—grass roots decision-making processes, in principal—was 17.6 million BF or 26.2%. Although not the 32% Rosa had told me, it was still impressive that ordinary people could decide the fate of over a quarter of the budget. Most of the budget not related to staff salaries was allocated in three areas: social development—where most funding had been decentralized—infrastructure and human resources. I needed to see the Municipal Controller for a more thorough understanding.

The controller is Argentina-born Guillermo Forti. In mid-1970s, the four young Forti brothers were on their way with their radical activist mother to the airport, hoping to fly to Venezuela where they would reunite with their father in exile, when forces of the military dictatorship arrested them. After some harrowing days, they let the brothers leave prison and Argentina but they kept their mother, whom they “disappeared”.

Guillermo graduated from law school in Venezuela and was elected to this important oversight position in Municipal Ribas. His brother, Mario, a studious Marxist-Christian-Astrologer was Rosa’s political advisor. Guillermo seemed to be an authentic overseer of funds, who had had run-ins with the mayor’s office for insisting that funds miss-allocated by some greedy members of a few community councils be returned. On the three occasions we met, he presented an overall view of the budget, which he concluded was generally well proportioned and utilized.

“These community councils are better than many in the country. A good example is that in some communities they used less funds than allocated to build water pumps, and the extra money went to other projects,” he told me.

“One of the chronic problems all Chavez municipal and state office backers have to contend with is the entrenched bureaucracies and officials and civil servants who skim what they can. Too many directors come from technical university backgrounds and there are too few with roots in the communities.”

I was amazed to hear politicians and civil servants speak openly of errors being made by the Chavez government and local supporters during my search to discover how well local government functioned and how well the infrastructure and social projects were advancing. This shows a healthy attitude towards leadership and building a better democracy. I heard many supporters of Chavez and Rosa voice critiques of their leaders in all government levels. Chavez was surrounded by too many people removed from the base and was pressured to moderate his drive toward socialism. The most common criticism of Rosa’s management centered on her naiveté, too much confidence in the good will of her people, failure to conduct management with a hard hand, too many advisors too removed from the grass roots, and employees more interested in acquiring expensive cars than in struggling for equality and progress for all.

Even top police officials wish Rosa were a tougher manager. Terry Rojas, chief of crime detective investigators (CICPC) for a five-municipality area including Ribas, told me frankly that Rosa was too kind toward those in her employ. “She needs an effective team, one that completes steps initiated.”

Chief Rojas produced figures indicating how common murder and vehicle robbery are. But he was optimistic that better coordination between Ribas municipal police and the investigative detective branch—something Rose had worked for—was improving recuperation of vehicles and detention of thieves. Eighty percent of stolen vehicles were recovered in 2007 compared with 60% in 2006. That year there were 94 homicides in Ribas; 79 accused murderers were arrested. In 2007, homicides were slightly down to 87.

If these figures represent reality, they defy what everyone told me: most criminals do not get caught or do not get imprisoned.

Crime and traffic accidents are major issues locally and nationally; people feel insecure.

“There are far too many accidents and deaths due to poorly maintained roads, reckless driving, and insufficient traffic police,” Rojas said. He also confirmed what I heard on the streets: many cops take bribes instead of issuing tickets, and many also participate in robberies or take payoffs from criminals.

“There is only one prosecutor for this five-municipal area so our investigation and judicial process is all too slow,” he lamented.

The new Chavez government liberalized the legal code (COOP), in 1999, granting greater juridical rights to arrestees. Detainees must appear before a judge within 48 hours of arrest. Those not apprehended at the scene of the crime are to be released—there is no bail system—during the criminal investigation, unless the judge can determine that there is a great risk of flight. Their cases can take years to adjudicate and they are free to commit more crime, say police.

The radical mayor of Caracas, Freddy Bernal, told the media, “In each important crime committed there is a metropolitan policeman involved.” “There are officers who rent their arms to criminals”. (Quinto Día, January 25).

Because of the difficulty in convicting criminals some police also commit extrajudicial killings, reported at from 100 to 300 annually in this decade. Few cases get prosecuted as there is no system of independent investigation of police abuse.

In March, Chavez announced a “National Police System Plan”. For the first time in history police were to be unified. There was top-level resistance to this since most police units adhere directly under governors, who have traditionally appointed police chiefs. Political considerations often take precedence over combating crime and rooting out corruption. The hope was that police unity would increase arrests and criminal prosecution, and improve vigilance over police behavior. Murder is the key issue for most.

On the national level, Interpol shows 10,000 annual murders (2006), which equates to 33 per 100,000 population, one of the world’s top ten homicide rates. Colombia’s 32,000 non-war related murders is a rate of 70 per 100,000. Right-wing mercenaries commit several thousands murders against prostitutes and homosexuals, part of their ideological “social cleansing” politics. Para-militarists also cross the border into Venezuela to sell drugs and guns at low prices to youth gangs, part of their ideological battle to destabilize the progressive government. They also serve rich landowners and cattlemen by murdering poor peasants and unionists in the border area. National figures show 200 such murders in recent times.

Ribas municipal police chief, Alberto Navas, told me, “This is a very violent area, mainly so because it is close to the capital and a transitional stop for people from the most backward areas of the country. With the new prosperity for many, those with nothing flee these areas in search of jobs and better living conditions in the cities. If they don’t find this, many live from crime. Some parts of Caracas are the poorest areas and have the greatest amount of crime. Most murders are of young gang members. Our hands are often tied because witnesses fear coming forth, and modern laws and judges render too lenient sentences.”

Another reason for high crime rates among youths is the lack of recreation facilities and entertainment. There are not even movie houses in the whole of Ribas. Before Rosa’s time as mayor there were three but they closed down for lack of profits. Many say Rosa should allocate funds to rectify this problem. Rosa has increased police pay but it is still not a well paid job and one with risks of physical violence.

On a parting note on this grime theme, I cite a June 23, 2008 Reuters story:

“Venezuela’s youth orchestras and choirs have helped [300,000] children resist thug life…and now wealthy countries are lining up to emulate the system.”

Part of the government’s efforts to combat barrio gangs from trafficking in drugs, from committing thievery and murders is to get them interested in classical music. There are now 200 such orchestras. As part of the $35 million project, each player gets a free instrument. Governments in Scotland, Britain, and Los Angeles are copying the idea. Venezuela is using the program in its crowded and violent prisons as well. Trombones confront pistols in this peaceful revolution, peaceful, at least, from the government’s side.

Read Parts 1 and 2.

Rosa León’s hope is to utilize more and more of the municipal budget for funding the needs of the people as they see fit. She launched the community councils and there are now 110 of them, although many do not function in reality. While the national government is responsible for building and maintaining the nation’s roadways, each municipality has or can have some of its funds to repair city streets. Rosa said her administration had repaired three streets, a total of 7 kilometers. She’d started construction of potable water wells and repairs of others. Progress had been made in the sewage system albeit my ubiquitous, sensitive nose could not confirm that. There were housing projects underway, albeit she could not count more than four houses completed. She was still trying to get weapons for the majority of municipal police; her plan for integrating the three separate policing entities in the municipal area was nearing accomplishment. She believed that 32% of the 63 million Bolivar budget [2.15 Bolivars-BF to $1 at official rate] is dispersed to decentralized entities for social projects, plus one million BF to supplement the national government funds for educational and health missions, operating apart from government entities.

“I don’t have all the figures and projects with me. But you can get the budget from our office,” Rosa told me. “You have to realize that there is a great deal of opposition pressure and even sabotage against our efforts. This state government does not help the Chavez national government or my municipality. Part of our budget, at least four million Bolivars designated for local needs such as potholes, is controlled by the state government, and it has not released these funds to us. Furthermore, some of our budget must go to pay off the large debt [12 million BF] acquired by the previous corrupt mayor, Luis Blanco. He is a friend of Aragua’s governor Didalco Bolivar.”

“My first year in government was spent evaluating the structures and learning the people’s needs. Then we began to allocate funds to barrio organizations. For example, we made paths in the hills where people live so that the old, pregnant and handicapped could walk out to the nearby markets and bus stops. We provided some paint for houses and walls. In 2006, social control of some projects began as the community councils took root.”

“Garbage collection is a major problem not only here but across the nation. The private companies weren’t doing a good job and were extremely costly so I didn’t renew the contracts and let the workers take over the recollection. The problem is they lack the trucks and other necessary equipment. The private companies took everything. We invested 4.5 million BF [7% of the budget] in recollection, in 2007. Almost no one pays tax for garbage collection. Our workers strive to do better but they need more equipment.”

Rosa explained that she had taken a two month leave of office at the end of 2007. She was under attack for fiscal inefficiency. She declared a financial emergency and went off to the state capital, Maracay, to fortify the community council network. Her lawyer cousin took over her mayoral tasks during that time.

“One of our greatest problems is internal,” Rosa confessed during our interview. “We have a tendency to be too casual in our statements and commitments. There is much fugaz [capriciousness]. We start things and don’t finish them; too much Corre Corre [haste and lack of follow through.] I had to go into debt and we’ve been paying it back since January 2008 when I returned to office.”

I mentioned that it would have been a good idea to plan replacement of equipment before ending the private garbage collection company contract. And what about an educational campaign to raise citizens’ consciousness about waste and trash? I recounted how I watch garbage workers come to pick up trash with bare hands—they don’t have gloves or masks—and right before their eyes people drop on the ground everything from cigarette butts and empty packets to food wrappings and empty bottles. Most people wrap their household trash in plastic bags and place them outside, seemly oblivious to the fact that dogs running rampant rip them up for whatever goodies there are inside. There are almost no trash cans. The streets and parks are constantly flooded with wastes. I also noted that the commercial media is 100% anti-Rosa and anti-Chavez and while they all find fault with garbage recollection, among everything else real and unreal, they do nothing to educate people to do their part. Why doesn’t the municipal government, and the political parties backing it, have any media?

“It is an error on my part, to some degree, not to have any media backing,” Rosa affirmed. “We do have some indirect access to two local alternative radio stations but some of the opposition has partial control too. All three local dailies are owned by capitalists and oppositionists. We have allocated a bit of money to creating a local radio station but its start has been delayed. The voceros should soon have a newsletter. And we have just hired a public relations man,” Rosa concluded.

In fact, it is about the same for commercial media on the national level. Of all the newspapers, radio and television stations the pro-Chavez parties and the government itself only control 20%. Practically all newspapers are capitalist owned and are nearly all pro-imperialist. The government only has one national radio station and four television stations. The greatest media asset is Telesur, a regional network begun by the Chavez government. I watch it regularly (also in Denmark) and find it to be professional and credible while delivering pro-socialist, pro-Chavez government plans. There is variety in programming, deep-probing interviews and documentaries, serious entertainment and films. Moreover, the national government has launched 500 community media initiatives in audiovisuals, press and radio stations.

The national opposition and the international mass media spread false propaganda that Chavez is thwarting media democracy. They most often cite the fact that the government refused to renew RCTV’s public license to broadcast, but they do not report the government’s documented reasons: RCTV regularly refused to devote the legally designated time for public service news, and had openly applauded the illegal, armed coup and did not even broadcast the national massive protests which brought him back to power. In fact, RCTV, the only medium to be denied public service broadcasting, still broadcasts over cable, which anyone can link up. I often watched it.

One of its series concentrated on the poor quality of hospital care. A camera crew filmed inside some of the hospitals, showing real defects and deficiencies, such as: open sewage, dysfunctional medical equipment, broken beds, decaying walls, lack of medicines and low salaries for workers. One program showed sanitary workers complaining to the RCTV crew about these conditions and when hospital security personnel attempted to oust the crew, the medical personnel prevented them from doing so.

From what I have seen, heard and read about the media in the two dozen countries where I have lived and or worked as a journalist over the last four decades, Venezuelans experience the most comprehensive freedom of press extant in the world today.

Shortly after our interview, Rosa, who is studying Social Communication in her spare time, discussed with me the possibility of my assisting her administration and community councils with my journalistic skills. I might conduct radio interviews and lectures, help with the upcoming newsletter and the like. In fact, I did begin a bit before Rosa cut ties with me. I gave a journalistic lecture to the Mission Sucre Social Communication classes conducted at the local university. The 40 students ranged from teenagers to grandparents. They were attentive and inquisitive. They not only asked pertinent questions they also engaged me in debate and challenged some of my views.

Soon thereafter I went to Caracas hoping to interest the pro-Chavez media in the Danish court case concerning seven Danish activists who support FARC and the PFLP in their liberation efforts.

In November 2007, a three-judge Copenhagen court found the activists, “Fighter and Lovers”, innocent of the Justice Ministry’s charge that they had materially supported “terror groups” FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine).

The seven solidarity activists had produced and sold t-shirts with FARC and PFLP emblems in an effort to raise a debate about Denmark’s terror law, which is shaped after USA’s Patriotic Act and EU’s terror list where FARC and PFLP appear. The lists are drawn behind closed doors by anonymous politicians whose criteria for selection are secret and the accused are denied rebuttal. Being on the list is therefore not juridical.

Among defense witnesses were the Venezuelan historian Amilcar Figueroa, alternative president of the Latin American Parliament (LAP), and Niels Lindvig, a Danish radio reporter with 25 years experience in covering Colombia and Latin America. They presented facts about President Alvaro Uribe’s ties to drug cartels and mercenaries. The defense referred to a 1991 US Defense Intelligence Agency report, which stated that Uribe collaborated with narcotic cartels (Pablo Escobar) when he was governor of Antioquia.

The court concluded that FARC and PFLP were not engaged in “terrorizing the population,” as is required in Danish law, paragraph 114, in order to be classified as terrorist. But the Danish government, which openly embraces Uribe and Bush, would not accept this decision and appealed the matter. (On September 18, 2008, the Eastern Lands Court voted 5 to 1 to overturn the lower decision that FARC and PFLP are not terrorist groups. Thus, it concluded six of the seven activists are guilty of supporting terror, and they were handed a sentence of from 60 days–suspended–to six months in prison for two of them. The defense is appealing to the Supreme Court.)

Chavez had gained wide acclaim for his humanitarian efforts to negotiate the release of civilian prisoners held by FARC in Colombia. He maintained the same position as “Fighters and Lovers”: that FARC is a legitimate liberation movement representing a majority of Colombia’s peasants in armed uproar for decades against a brutal oligarchy whose governments oppress them. I hoped that if he knew of the Danish court decision Chavez could use that to help sway some who oppose FARC for being terrorists. I was interviewed by the national daily VEA, a few local radio and TV stations and the national VIVE TV station, which reflects grass roots organizations. The interview most viewed was VTV’s contra golpe (counterpunch) program with Vanessa Davis. She was later elected on the 15-person leadership council of the new political party PSUV (United Socialist Party of Venezuela), into which 5.7 million of the population of 27 million had registered.

Vanessa Davis went straight to the theme of FARC—was it terrorist or not—and then to EXXON, which was trying to strangle Venezuela’s nationalization of its oil and gas. She gave me no time to put in a plug for the La Victoria government of Rosa León. It would have been natural to do so, but it was not a priority. When I got back to La Victoria I was to meet with Rosa to solidify my role with her administration, but she gave me the cold shoulder for having failed to mention her on TV.

Read Part 1.