Deprived stasis

In his first visit to the country, the Polish author and renowned journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski describes in a masterly fashion the extreme dire straits of the destitute masses in India in the 1950s.

“It was a gray, overcast day by the time we pulled into Sealdah Station. On every square inch of the enormous terminal, on its long platforms, its dead-end tracks, the swampy fields nearby, sat or lay thousands of emaciated people -under streams of rains, in the water and the mud; it was the rainy season, and the heavy tropical downpour did not abate for a moment. I was struck at once by the poverty of these soaked skeletons, their untold numbers, and, perhaps most of all, their immobility. They seemed a lifeless component of this dismal landscape, whose sole kinetic element was the sheets of water pouring from the sky. There was of course a certain, albeit desperate, logic and rationality in the utter passivity of these unfortunates: they sought no shelter from the downpour because they had nowhere to go -this was the end of their road- and they made no exertion to cover themselves because they had nothing to cover themselves with.

[...] An old woman next to me was digging a bit of rice out of the folds of her sari. She poured it into a little bowl and started to look around, perhaps for water, perhaps for fire, so that she could boil the rice. I noticed several children near her, eyeing the bowl. Staring -motionless, wordless. This last a moment, and the moment drags on. The children do not throw themselves on the rice; the rice is the property of the old woman, and these children have been inculcated with something more powerful than hunger.

A man is pushing his way through the huddled multitudes. He jostles the old woman, the bowl drops from her hands, and the rice scatters onto the platform, into the mud, amidst the garbage. In that split second, the children throw themselves down, dive between the legs of those still standing, dig around in the muck trying to find the grains of rice. The old woman stands there empty-handed, another man shoves her. The old woman, the children, the train station, everything -soaked through by the unending torrents of a tropical downpour. An I too stand dripping wet, afraid to take a step; and anyway, I don´t know where to go.”

Ryszard Kapuscinski, 2007, Travels with Herodotus, New York, Vintage, pp. 28-29. Trans. from the Polish by Klara Glowczewska.

Photo: Flyover kids, Calcutta, 2009 © Soham Gupta

Puppet minorities

‘If we collaborate with the army, the terrorists try to kill us. If we collaborate with the terrorists, he will kill us’. Thus speaks to a foreign journalist the inhabitant of a Kurdish village in South-Eastern Turkey.[1] The terrorists are the PKK, the guerrilla of the Turkish kurds, while he is the officer of the Turkish military police who shadows the journalist everywhere he goes in the area.

We tend to think of minorities in certain regions torn by war, poverty and terror as inevitably repressed in every possible realm by the government of the country they are settled in, and perhaps by the majoritarian social group as well. While this is generally the case, especially if the minority belongs to a different ethnic group than the majority, or possesses a distinct culture, language or religion, or supported the wrong side in a recent armed conflict involving the country, we risk overlooking another important fact which also prevents peace and social tolerance from being accomplished. Quite often, minorities are manipulated by the leaders of neighbouring Nation-States in which the ethno-cultural group of the minority in question constitutes the social majority and/or enjoys significant political or military power. In other words, some governments and armed groups tend to manipulate minorities settled in nearby countries when both belong to the same ethno-cultural family, and they do so out of sheer geopolitical interests. Thus, sometimes minorities are not only victims of their oppressors, but also of their unwillingness to integration and adaptation to the new circumstances, a reluctance which reaches tragic proportions when the prospects for democratization are real.

While this phenomenon has been somehow present in many armed conflicts throughout history -let us remember, for instance, Italy´s manipulation of Italian communities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire territories, and the role these Irredenta claims played during World War I-, it is perhaps in the contemporary world where it has shown the real measure of its disruptive capabilities.

In the aforementioned example of the Kurdish communities of Eastern Turkey, both the PKK guerrillas and some Iraqi Kurdish leaders have influenced the Turkish kurds into not making compatible their belonging to the Turkish State with their maintaining their Kurdish cultural ties. In the India-administered part of Kashmir -Jammu and Kashmir-, Pakistan-sponsored groups have been pressuring muslim population not to comply with Indian legislation nor obeying Indian authorities. Obviously, Turkish and local Indian repression -particularly in the former case-, respectively, has not made things easy for those minorities.

Examples abound, but perhaps two of the most salient in global affairs are those of Kosovo´s serbs and Palestinian refugees. The Serb residents of Mitrovica, in northern Kosovo, are just pawns in the regional game the government of Serbia is playing against the international community not to acknowledge the former Serb province´s independence. While they affirm to be defending the interest of that community, it is obvious they detached themselves from it a long time ago.[2] The life of that Kosovan minority would improve substantially if it accepted the new institutions, though the EU and the UN will have to be vigilant and force the Kosovan government to live up to its democratic constitution.

In the same manner, during more than half a century, Palestinian refugees have been equally manipulated by Arab leaders, who, claiming to be backing up their quest for returning to the Palestinian lands they left -forced by the Israeli army or voluntarily-, kept them in refugee camps and prevented them from integrating in their host countries, where many of them -or their descendants-, after 50 or 60 years, still do not have a full citizenship status, and are among the poorest inhabitants in their respective host countries.[3] They have also been pawns in a greater game, the one being played in the Middle Eastern power politics.

As in every conflict, often attributions of pure good and evil are difficult to make. Reality is much more complex than what defenders of different sides want us to believe.

References:

[1] Michael Ignatieff, Blood and belonging. Journeys into the new nationalism, London, Vintage, 1994.

[2] Michael Ignatieff, Empire lite, London, Vintage, 2003.

[3] Joan B. Culla, Israel, el somni I la tragèdia. Del sionisme al conflicte de Palestina, Barcelona, Edicions La campana, 2005.

Photo: Erbil refugee camp, Iraqi Kurdistan, 2007 © Emmanuel Smague