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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 February 2000 Issue No. 468 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 February 2000 Issue No. 468
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Focus Profile Travel Books Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters A week in the world
EU coming through
By Peter Snowdon
"The great nations of Europe
Had gathered on the shore
They'd conquered what was behind them
And now they wanted more
So they looked to the mighty ocean
And took to the western sea
The great nations of Europe
In the sixteenth centuryHide your wives and daughters
Hide your groceries too
Great nations of Europe coming through"Randy Newman, Bad Love (Dreamworks)
Last week saw the agreement of the pact which will replace the Lomé convention, under which the nations of the European Union (EU) had previously extended preferential trading relations to their former colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP).
The new arrangements, which have been under negotiation for some two years, have long been overshadowed by the spectre of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and mounting rebellion against what American business leaders viewed as the unacceptable trade privileges accorded to ACP producers by the EU. This quarrel came to a head last year when a major battle broke out over the preferential terms accorded ACP banana growers, a subject which had long been a bone of contention for US-based fruit companies such as Chiquita and Dole.
The new trade pact effectively caves in to WTO dogma, requiring the ACP countries, many of which are among the poorest in the world, to open their borders to European companies if they are to continue to enjoy free access for their own goods to European markets. By doing so, it can only accelerate the already dramatic growth of long-distance trade, and of the environmental and social destruction which accompany it.
The pact goes further than the WTO ever imagined, however, in imposing draconian new immigration rules on the recipients of Northern largesse. Henceforth, any immigrants arriving in the EU from the ACP zone without proper documents will be deported whence they came, even if they are not legally resident in the country of departure. This is the first time that the EU has directly linked trade conditions to its increasingly rigorous immigration regime.
It is a shame that the countries of the South were unable to enforce analogous conditions of their own in the 16th century, when they were first being "discovered" by the ancestors of Jacques Santer and Romano Prodi. If they had, it might today be the ACP nations who were dictating terms to an over-populated, socially-devastated and ecologically-exhausted Europe, rather than the reverse.
Five centuries of rape, pillage and genocide might seem like more than enough for any one civilisation. But there is no peace for the colonialist, even at the dawn of a new millennium.
This week brought another setback for the U'wa people in their fight to prevent Occidental Petroleum of the US and the government of Colombia from going ahead with an oil-drilling project which will devastate their ancestral lands. A protest camp on the planned site was violently broken up by the police, and three of the protesters are now reported missing.
The U'wa, who regard oil as the sacred blood of their Mother Earth, have been fighting the Occidental project since 1992, and have successfully argued that the original license to drill was granted in violation of their constitutional rights. A Colombian court upheld their claim in 1995, and the project ground to a halt. Negotiations then followed with the government -- who see the oil at Samoré as "very important to the economy" -- and with "Oxy" -- who estimate the reserves as barely enough to meet three months of US demand. But the U'wa refused to compromise.
In September, the government finally lost patience and took unilateral action, bringing the indigenous reserve under direct government rule, and redefining the boundaries of the territory. Shortly afterwards, a definitive licence to drill was issued to the American company.
The 5,000 members of the U'wa tribe have threatened to commit mass suicide if the drilling goes ahead. In this, they will themselves be repeating a centuries-old tradition: in the late 1600s, an U'wa community threw themselves off a cliff rather than face colonisation by the Spanish.
Their descendants can take little comfort from the joint declaration issued last week by the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) outlining the first phase of their peace talks which are due to commence shortly. While the FARC continues to press for land reform -- including the expropriation of land left lying idle, and a limit on the size of rural estates -- the government of Andrés Pastrana remains committed to the privatisation of public utilities and policies aimed at "macro-economic stability" (i.e. maximising the accumulation of capital by local and foreign investors, so as to avoid a run on the currency).
Augusto Ramirez of the National Peace Council said the aim was to achieve a middle way between "savage capitalism" and communism, namely, what he termed "a globalised economy". FARC guerrillas and ideologues curious to know just what a globalised economy might feel like could always ask the U'wa.
Not that FARC has exactly been a good friend to the indigenous population: its war against Occidental's Caño Limon pipeline just north of U'wa territory has torn the region apart, and brought much suffering to the local inhabitants. Last year, three American activists working with the U'wa were assassinated by FARC guerrillas.
Indigenous movements, in Latin America and elsewhere, are often dismissed, both by internal interests and external observers, as a form of anthropological diversion which can have little impact on the mainstream of political power. But the recent quasi-revolution in Ecuador shows that the oldest inhabitants of a continent may also be able to emerge as among its most powerful leaders.
In an interview with the Inter Press Service, Antonio Vargas of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), who came close to seizing power on 21 January, denied that the intervention of junior army officers represented a failure for the people. Instead, he insisted that the choice to grant a six-month "truce" to the new government of vice president Gustavo Noboa had been the right one. "What occurred on 21 January was a rehearsal," Vargas told the IPS. "It made people feel in their hearts that change is possible."
CONAIE has now demanded a four-point referendum to "reaffirm democracy", including a vote on whether to proceed with deposed president Jamil Mahuad's plan to replace the national currency, the sucre, with the dollar. The proposed dollarisation of the economy was one of the principal causes of the uprising, which united many different sectors of Ecuadorian society under indigenous leadership, and against the policies of the government.
"If the government love democracy so much and fill their mouths with it," Vargas observed, "they should return sovereignty to the people and prove they are truly democrats."
