World on Fire World on Fire World on Fire

by Amy Chua

  In Mexico after the Second World War, for example, President Miguel Alemán declared that “Private enterprise should have complete freedom. . . . [T]he state should guarantee the rights of businessmen to open centers of production and to multiply the country’s industries.” Shocking ordinary Mexicans, Alemán reprivatized the oil and mining industries that Cardenas had so dramatically nationalized. In Guatemala, after seizing power in 1954, a new pro-capitalism military government reconfiscated the land previously given to the country’s indigenous majority and reinstated the latifundia system. By 1964, Guatemala’s white-owned plantations, representing just 2 percent of total farms, occupied 72 percent of the country’s land. By contrast, the vast majority of the largely Mayan Indian peasantry owned either no land or too little land to survive. Today most barely eke out a living on less than two dollars a day, and roughly 60 percent do not know how to read and write. In all the Latin American countries—even in nominally democratic countries where Amerindians constitute a majority of the population—indigenous people have always been treated as politically and socially subordinate.24

  All this, however, may be changing. Globalization is transforming and in many ways destabilizing the societies of Latin America. Western pro-democracy and human rights organizations, often partially funded by the U.S. government, are working on behalf of, and helping to mobilize, a growing number of indigenous communities throughout Latin America. Their projects vary, but typically include the promotion of indigenous rights, the empowerment of indigenous communities, and litigation alleging racial and ethnic discrimination. Many of these initiatives are extremely valuable, and long overdue. At the same time, by raising ethnic consciousness, they may inadvertently and indirectly increase ethnic conflict.

  “Ethnicity” and “indigenousness” are often used by political leaders in ways not predicted by idealistic Western democracy and human rights proponents. For example, both the Amerindian movement led by Mallku in Bolivia and the Conaie movement led by Fernando Villavicencio in Ecuador are far more vitriolic, anti-market, and antiwhite than Western NGOs promoting indigenous consciousness would like. Mallku is demanding renationalization of Bolivia’s natural gas reserves and vows to fight to his death both “U.S. gringo imperialism” and “minority rule by Whites and mestizos”; ten people died in the violent protests he spearheaded in 2000. In Chile, which has only a tiny Amerindian population, frustrated Mapuche Indians in southern Chile have been invading white-owned farms in a style similar to that of Zimbabwe’s war veterans. Meanwhile, Venezuela’s pro-pardo, anti-American Hugo Chavez, who “played the ethnic card” to win the presidency in free and fair elections, was never very popular in the United States, not even in left-leaning circles.

  In Brazil, where Western NGOs have been particularly active, for the first time in the country’s history and to the growing concern of the largely white establishment, an ethnicized all-black political party has been formed that openly champions Afro-Brazilian empowerment. Also for the first time in Brazilian history—as critics in Brazil and around the world lament—Brazil is enacting a series of “affirmative action” programs for blacks (although who is “black” enough to qualify is not obvious to anyone). Just in the last decade, dozens of emphatically black organizations and magazines have emerged, and T-shirts with slogans like “100% Negro” are suddenly a common sight in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.25

  There is much about the recent ethnic reawakening in Latin America that is praiseworthy. Latin America’s indigenous movements are often compared to the civil rights struggle of African-Americans in the United States during the 1960s. “[P]eople of Indian blood are fighting,” writes the Washington Post’s Anthony Faiola, “and in many cases, winning, an unprecedented crusade for a louder political voice while celebrating and recapturing their cultural identities as never before.” After centuries in which “whiteness” and Western tastes were idolized, observes Faiola, today “everything from Aztec gods to the earth symbols of Patagonian Indians have emerged as politically charged fashion statements in the T-shirts and tattoos worn by youths of the region.” At the same time, there has been a boom in the publication of poetry, folklore, and textbooks in Quechua, Aymara, and other Indian languages as part of state-funded bilingual education programs. “What you’re seeing is a major indigenous awakening that is having a massive impact on politics, law, and culture,” says Diego Iturralde, an anthropologist based in Quito. “It is overthrowing governments, changing constitutions and generally altering the norms of society in Latin America.”26

  But there are of course dangers, too—of ethnic scapegoating and accelerating group hatred. What the future will bring for Latin America’s mixed-blooded countries is impossible to know. If history is any guide, the region’s wealthy, educated, globally-connected market-dominant “whites” will maintain their traditional stranglehold on both politics and the economy. In Ecuador, for example, one year after a popular Indian uprising toppled the pro-market government of President Jamil Mahuad, a new white-dominated pro-market regime is once again in place. The country’s infuriated Amerindian leaders say they “were betrayed” and warn that the country faces “social explosion.”27

  In much of Latin America, as in many countries throughout the non-Western world, the two major components of globalization—markets and democracy—are on a collision course. Democratization, to the extent that it actually begins to resemble genuine majority rule, poses a serious threat to the status quo. This is particularly true in countries where most of the people are—or can be taught by media-savvy demagogues to think they are—“indigenous” or black, and where the rich can easily be depicted as colonizing “white” “outsiders.” Mallku’s slogans in Bolivia are frighteningly similar to those of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe: “We indigenous peoples are like foreigners in our own ancestral lands”; “We are governed by whites who have stolen our power and land”; “While we are ruled by this minority of whites and mestizos the crisis will continue”; “The whites should leave the country”; and, “Our blood has been spilled and must be atoned for.”28 Mallku’s fellow Aymara Evo Morales, who also champions nationalization on the ground that the “indigenous people” are the “absolute owners” of the land, shocked observers by placing second in Bolivia’s 2002 presidential election, behind the white mining magnate and former president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada.

  CHAPTER 7

  Backlash against

  Market-Dominant Minorities

  Expulsions and Genocide

  In Omarska, Keraterm, and other Serbian death camps in 1990 and 1991, torture was recreational; the victims were typically executed anyway. In one case a guard cut off one prisoner’s ear and forced another prisoner to eat it. In another case a man’s testicles were tied to the back of a motorcycle, which then sped off, leaving the man to die of massive blood loss.1

  In Rwanda in the 1990s, a Tutsi woman, who had already seen seven members of her immediate family shot or hacked to death, begged a kindly Hutu couple to hide her twenty-month-old son from roaming death squads. The couple took the boy in, then killed him.2

  Under what conditions do human beings do such things?

  Ethnically targeted confiscations and autocratic crony capitalism are hardly optimal outcomes. But things can get unimaginably worse. In a frightening number of cases, democratization in the face of a market-dominant minority has led to government-encouraged attempts to “cleanse” the country of the minority altogether. Strategies for doing so include forced emigration, expulsions, and in the worst cases pogroms, extermination, and genocide. Typically, such policies are triggered by aggravating circumstances, for example an economic crisis, a border war, or the fortuitous rise of a particularly effective, hate-filled demagogue. Almost always, such policies are passionately supported by an aroused and angry “indigenous” majority, motivated by tremendous feelings of grievance and inferiority.

  Induced Emigration and Expulsions

  In some cases a majority backlash against a ma
rket-dominant minority takes the relatively mild form of oppressive language requirements, discriminatory education laws, and discriminatory citizenship and economic policies, all intended to “encourage” the resented minority to “voluntarily” leave the country. For example, in the non-Russian republics of the former Soviet Union, Russians were for years an economically and politically dominant “colonizer” minority, typically dominating key industrial and technical positions and occupying the best housing. Perestroika and political liberalization exposed the brutalities—including purges, deportations, and mass deaths—of the Soviet era, provoking widespread anti-Russian outrage among the indigenous majorities. In nearly all of the non-Russian republics, independence and democratization spawned a host of discriminatory laws, job-firings, and even violence. As a result, between 1989 and 1996 more than two million Russians, especially from Central Asia and Transcaucasia, abandoned their homes in favor of the chaos of post-Soviet Russia.

  Meanwhile in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, anti-Jewish violence and political hatemongering in recent years have contributed to a large emigration of Jews to Israel (about 67,000 in 1999) and to Western countries (about 30,000 in 1999). Similarly, in Indonesia, popularly supported anti-Chinese economic policies pursued by the Habibie government in 1998, together with widespread anti-Chinese violence, prompted approximately 110,000 Sino-Indonesian families (including most of the wealthiest) to leave the country, taking tens of billions of dollars in capital with them. While many of the Sino-Indonesian families have returned, the capital has not.3

  In Ethiopia, where members of the Eritrean minority have long dominated business, especially in key sectors such as transportation, construction, and electronics, the government took a more direct approach. Between 1998 and 1999 the Ethiopian government deported en masse 52,000 Eritrean-Ethiopians—almost the entire Eritrean community—as part of a larger war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. In classic ethnonationalist fashion, the expelled Eritreans—most of whom thought of themselves as Ethiopians—were first stripped of their citizenship. They were also deprived of education and separated from their families, with their businesses, pensions, and bank accounts subject to expropriation. Many of the deported Eritreans say they were forced to sign powers of attorney handing over their property to “full Ethiopians.” The Eritreans blame their expulsion on Ethiopian “jealousy, revenge, and greed”; some have called the actions “economic cleansing.”

  The Ethiopian government played a major role in fomenting ethnic division and hatred within the country. Starting in 1992 the government issued to all residents identity cards providing an “ethnic” designation—for example, “Eritrean.” Although Eritreans have lived in Ethiopia as long as either country has existed within defined boundaries, the Ethiopian government subsequently declared all Eritreans to be “non-Ethiopian,” then “non-citizens,” and ultimately “aggressors.” Such scapegoating tactics have proved sadly effective in exacerbating ethnic hatred, a boon for the Ethiopian government, which looks forward to revenues from the expropriated properties and hails the awakening of a “true” Ethiopian people united “against an enemy in their midst.”4

  The Rwandan Genocide

  The tragic case of Rwanda illustrates the most extreme form of majority-supported, democracy-assisted efforts to exterminate an economically dominant ethnic minority. Historically, Rwanda’s roughly 85 percent Hutus were cultivators, whereas the roughly 14 percent Tutsis were herdsmen. “This was the original inequality: cattle are a more valuable asset than produce,” writes Philip Gourevitch. After 1860, when Mwame Kigeri Rwabugiri, a Tutsi, ascended the Rwandan throne, the stratification between Hutus and Tutsis intensified. Rwanda essentially became a feudal kingdom in which Tutsis were overlords and Hutus their vassals. Still, the line distinguishing Hutu and Tutsi was much more porous than it would become later: The two groups spoke a common language, intermarriage occurred, and successful Hutus could “become Tutsi.”

  In classic divide-and-conquer fashion, the Belgian colonizers injected a sharper and much more divisive sense of ethnicity into Rwandan society—a sense of ethnicity that also happened to corroborate the Belgians’ own “scientific” beliefs about racial superiority. To facilitate their own goals of colonial subjugation, the Belgians perpetuated the myth that the Tutsi—usually stereotyped as lanky, light-skinned, and thin-lipped—were genetically superior to, and thus born to rule over, the supposedly stockier, darker, thick-lipped Hutus. According to Gourevitch,

  In addition to military and administrative chiefs, and a veritable army of churchmen, the Belgians dispatched scientists to Rwanda. The scientists brought scales and measuring tapes and calipers, and they went about weighing Rwandans, measuring Rwandan cranial capacities, and conducting comparative analyses of the relative protuberances of Rwandan noses. Sure enough, the scientists found what they had believed all along. Tutsis had “nobler,” more “naturally” aristocratic dimensions than the “coarse” and “bestial” Hutus. On the “nasal index,” for instance, the median Tutsi nose was found to be about two and a half millimeters longer and nearly five millimeters narrower than the median Hutu nose.5

  In 1933–34 the Belgians conducted a “census,” then issued “ethnic” identity cards. These identity cards made it almost impossible for Hutus to become Tutsis. They also allowed the Belgians to rule Rwanda indirectly through a system in which Tutsi chiefs controlled the Hutu majority, extracting their labor on behalf of the Europeans.

  The Belgians openly favored the “more intelligent, more active” and more “refined” Tutsis, giving them superior education and assigning them all the best administrative and political positions. The Hutu majority was reduced to a humiliated pool of forced labor, required to toil en masse under their Tutsi taskmasters. Over the years, what French scholar Gerald Prunier has called “an aggressively resentful inferiority complex” deepened and festered among the Hutus.6 By the time independence rolled around, the Tutsi were a starkly privileged, “arrogant,” economically dominant ethnic minority. And the Hutu political activists who were calling for “majority rule” and “democratic revolution” were seeking not equality—but revenge.

  In March 1957, nine influential Hutu intellectuals published a tract known as the Hutu Manifesto, calling for “democracy.” Employing typical ethnonationalist rhetoric, the manifesto argued that Tutsis were “foreign invaders” and that “Rwanda was by rights a nation of the Hutu majority.” As usual, more moderate political voices were drowned out by the more compelling voices of ethnic demagoguery. Extremists all over the country rallied large crowds with calls to unite in their “Hutuness.” Meanwhile, the Belgians, seemingly oblivious to the escalating ethnic rhetoric, and now playing the role of ex-colonizer assisting the transition to independence, scheduled elections. But before the elections were even held, warfare began.

  Rwanda’s “social revolution,” which eventually drove out the Belgians, began in November 1959. After a Hutu politician was attacked by Tutsis, violence spread throughout the country. In a popular uprising known as “the wind of destruction,” Hutus, usually organized in groups of ten and led by a man blowing a whistle, conducted a campaign of pillage, arson, and murder against Tutsis. In the midst of all this, even as Hutus were torching Tutsi homes, elections were held in 1960. Not surprisingly, given Rwanda’s demographics, Hutus won 90 percent of the top political posts. By then over twenty thousand Tutsis had been displaced from their homes and many thousands more killed or exiled. Hutu leaders organizing the violence were always the first to snatch Tutsi property.7

  Rwanda was granted full independence in 1962. Inaugurated as the country’s first president was Grégoire Kayibanda, one of the original authors of the Hutu Manifesto, who gave a speech proclaiming, “Democracy has vanquished feudalism.” But this was democracy of a pathological variety. President Kayibanda, notes Gourevitch, was at best a dull leader: “Stirring up the Hutu masses to kill Tutsis was the only way he seemed able to keep the spirit of the revolution alive.” In
late December 1963, highly organized Hutu massacres left almost fourteen thousand Tutsis dead in the southern province of Gikongoro alone. Most of the victims were well-educated Tutsi men, although women and children were killed as well, often clubbed or speared to death, their corpses thrown into a river after their clothes were taken.8

  In 1973 a Hutu major general by the name of Juvénal Habyarimana seized power in a coup. Calling for a moratorium on anti-Tutsi violence, and even including some Tutsis in his rubber-stamp parliament, Habyarimana ruled Rwanda as a corrupt totalitarian state for two decades, engorging himself while the majority of Rwandans lived in extreme, frustrated poverty.

  In the early 1990s the wave of democratization then sweeping the world hit Rwanda. Responding to pressure from the United States and Western Europe, and particularly from France, President Habyarimana made a show of abandoning totalitarianism in favor of “pluralism” and multiparty democracy. But the new “pluralistic” politics quickly showed a dangerously ethnic face. Among the non–sham opposition parties, only one had a significant Tutsi membership. Worse, Hutu extremists, inflaming old Hutu fears and resentments, quickly captured the democratic process, turning Rwanda politics for the Hutus into a matter of survival and self-defense. Hutus had to unite and fight against their common “domestic enemy,” otherwise the Tutsis would take over the country again and destroy them first. This popular movement became known enthusiastically as Hutu Power.9