When analyzing the situation of a country or when thinking about a country, it’s easy to be tempted by the idea of how desirable or good would be for a country to be able to start over, to start a new life again, from the very beginning, from zero. In many circumstances and situations, it’s always possible to star again. If there is an old building that is so dirty that when you look at it you feel bad, it’s always possible to order the demolition of that construction. The same with cars, that when get old and highly pollutant, it’s just better to dispose of it and buy a new one. Even individuals have the chance of trying to change the course of their complex lives: every time we celebrate our birthday or a new year, we think about goals for the future. Well, countries can also become as dirty or as old as buildings and cars, and their institutions can become as corrupt as the most corrupt of individuals, but now it seems, countries don’t have anymore at their disposal the privilege of starting over. There was a time when they could, that’s the era of revolutions, but that’s also a time gone. For some countries, it would be great to have that chance. One of these countries is Honduras.
This world we live in is so unfair and so uneven that, just as individuals, there are countries that were born rich and there are countries that were born poor and disadvantaged. This time I want to refer to a tiny country that is very close to my native country and which over the last weeks experienced the last coup d’Etat of Latin America. I am talking about Honduras.
I don’t know too much about the history and the specific circumstances of Honduras, but I know that this is one of the countries that were born poor and which inherited a list of problems whose complexity largely surpasses the capacities of the Honduras’ governments. Last month one more problem added to the list: on June 29th 2009, the legal government of president Manuel Zelaya was ousted by the military, and a new president Roberto Micheletti took his place. Because he was following Hugo Chavez (no need to explain my point) the deposed president was bad for the country, who was trying to force a Constitutional reform in order to extend his tenure and bad also is the fact that the military, for whatsoever reason, broke the legal order and took power.
The current situation in Honduras constitutes an unprecedented twice negative dilemma of two bad possible outcomes: if the military government headed by Micheletti stays, this clearly would be bad to the political health of the country and if Zelaya returns it would be also bad, because he has already proved that he wants to disrupt the constitutional life of Honduras. Two possible outcomes, both of them awful. Actually there’s a third possible outcome to this Honduras story that started as a drama but that very soon has become a Latin America soap opera: the possibility that violence erupts as a consequence of the two sides fighting.
Is it possible to find in the political landscape of the world of the past or of these days any other situation where all the outcomes are bad? Honduras has everything that makes it look like a building to be demolished or a car to be replaced. Unfortunately, Honduras is a country and transforming its situation will never be as simple as demolishing an old building, replacing a car or transforming an individual. It seems that Honduras can’t start over.
It’s not my purpose to deny hope for the people of Honduras. It’s not that I don’t see any hope for Honduras, it’s that I’m projecting my own despair for how I see my country, Mexico. Sometimes you would like that things change in your country as easy as if an old building was ordered to be demolished or if an old car was to be throw away. Sometimes you would desire that things change overnight and that the politicians that rule our mismanaged countries just disappear. How is possible that with that long list of problems that Honduras faces (poverty, corruption, inequality, natural disasters, deprivation), Honduras politicians still have the time to stage a soap opera of a military coup?
At first I thought that the military coup of Micheletti was born from the despair of the Honduras people, tired of having as president a Chavez like politician. I thought that like military coups of the past, this new Honduras version of military take over would be accompanied with a vast program of changes for the transformation of Honduras. However, very soon I realized that I have been too naïve. The military coups of these days are not like they used to be. There’s no more transformational radicalism embodied in the people that take power these days. There’s no program, no ideology, nor any agenda for change. So far, the Honduras military coup has proved to be only an action that broke the legal order of the country, so it was a purposeless coup.
The Honduras’ as well as the Thai military take over of 2006, constitute a big change from the past. Even the military coups of today seem to have become mild in their actions and purposeless for that they don’t present any alternative program, any agenda for change. They are born only from denial of a certain order, but they fail to offer any alternative.
As said, any of the possible outcomes of the Honduras’ crisis seems to be ideal for this country afflicted by so many threats, deformities and irregularities. Let’s just hope that these stupid political teams of Micheletti and Zelaya don’t decide to make the Honduras people pay with blood for this pathetic Latin American new soap opera.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Friday, July 10, 2009
In soccer as in life, when everything goes bad, everything goes bad…
Look:
June 24th 2009: US 2-Spain 0;
July 9th 2009: Mexico 1-Panama 1
For Mexico, football soccer, a reflection of everything else? It’s up to you to reflect…I am just saying…
June 24th 2009: US 2-Spain 0;
July 9th 2009: Mexico 1-Panama 1
For Mexico, football soccer, a reflection of everything else? It’s up to you to reflect…I am just saying…
My perspective on the Xinjiang (7/5) riots
Sadness and regret were the feelings I first had toward the riots in Xinjiang of past July 5th. I have lived in China for seven years and Western China has always been my favorite region in the country, the only region in the country where I have been seen really different things, where I have been a tourist satiated whit what the place has to offer. Western China has always captivated my interest, in no small measure for one of its most prolific peoples, the Uighurs, whose cultural features have always been my favorites among the Chinese kaleidoscope. In short, I love China but I love also what I have seen of the Uighur culture and so, for me the conflict between Chinese Han and the Uighur people has always been something that saddens me. I say that because in many respects, even if in most of the time I have been a supporter of China among its critics, the conflict of China with some its so called minorities has been an aspect where I have not always agreed with the Chinese government nor with the extended vision that (Han) Chinese people usually hold on that matter. I see in the Chinese a certain degree of underlying racism toward Uighurs and Tibetans and this is something I don’t like.
On the other hand is impossible not to see that without the industrialization, the development of infrastructure, the urbanization and the investment of the central government of China, Xinjiang would not be that different from all its neighbors, from Pakistan to Kyrgyzstan. If you go to Xinjiang, what you see is that Urumqi is a huge city, that there’s a railway that crosses hundreds of kilometers where there’s nothing except desert and in Kashgar you see also that there´s an airport that is much bigger and efficient than the airports of most of Mexico. Like it or not, the Chinese government and the Han have played a civilizatory role in what is now Western China, they have been like the British in India that built all the railways. Like it or not, the Han Chinese and its government are the industrious hand of that area of Central Asia, they have been like the white man in tropical lands. (Actually, when I had this reflection, I thought about at what extent the Chinese are really different from the white man…topic for another time). It’s very likely that in an scenario of one wealthy China not ruling what it’s now its Western edge and one independent Xinjiang, the Uighurs and the Tibetans would be flooding the Chinese consulates trying to get Chinese visas.
In analyzing the long history of hostility between China and its Western “minorities”, especially the Tibetans and the Uighur, there is a basic list of “undeniables” from which you can depart:
1) It’s undeniable that the Han Chinese have been generally racists to the Tibetans and the Uighurs, usually referring to them as thieves or beggars and frequently saying of them that they are dirty and their culture backward. Even the Chinese Communist Party vision of harmony between the Han and the minorities has a certain dose of racisms: in all the official images of the minorities, the Han Chinese depict the minorities as colorful peoples that spend the time dancing. For most of the Han Chinese, the Uighurs are very good at dancing…it’s like, besides that, they are incapable of seeing in the Uighurs or Tibetans something different or something else. This racist Chinese vision of the world translates in the seduction that the white skin and the American culture have on the Chinese versus the general attitude of Chinese looking down at black skinned people.
2) There’s no question that the Chinese central government investment in Western China has all the potential to have a positive impact on the economy, the problem is that this economy, most of the time, has been the Han economy.
3) Closely related with this last point, in Xinjiang and also very possible in Tibet, you have the feeling when you are there that those lands are not China anymore. I am not talking about politics nor saying anything more that what I am saying here, but in Xinjiang the sun raises at least two hours later than in Beijing and the taxi drivers don’t listen to the cheesy pop music of the Taiwanese singers, but instead they like Indian music. As the result of a similar logic, in that foreign land you feel that the Han are the rulers and you feel that the locals are like foreigners in their own land. The ruling institutions function in Chinese, which is not the mother language of the local populations.
4) I don’t think that with all its propaganda directed at creating harmony, the Chinese government has been very successful at integrating Han communities with no Han communities. This is evident in Xinjiang and very evident in Urumqi, where the Han live in one area and the Uighurs in another area, where there are restaurants for Chinese and restaurants for Uighurs. At a certain point this is normal, but in Xinjiang you feel that there are two different communities that don’t talk to each other. Clearly, this is a powerful factor that has created a gap of hostility between these two communities. I don’t have any statistic at hand, but I don’t think that intercommunity marriages between Han and Tibetans or Uighurs are very frequent.
5) On the other hand, it’s also undeniable that the Xinjiang neighborhood is one very difficult to rule. Turn your eyes to Pakistan or Afghanistan, are those countries in peace? Well, those countries were bombings and terrorists attacks are daily currency are just next door to Xinjiang. As a result, the Chinese are not the first to be in conflict with the peoples of that region of the world. Ask the British, ask the Americans if they think that is easy to be in those lands?
6) No matter what the independentists or the secessionist could say about this matter, but Beijing is the ruler of Tibet and Xinjiang and anything is going to change that reality. There have been and there are large Han Chinese populations in those areas and what drives the economy of those territories is the Chinese economic activity. Besides, in a world where there’s a growing number of rogue states, who wants an independent Xinjiang or Tibet? Honestly, there are more important things to do these days.
7) Like it or not, it’s also true that the Chinese have been in Tibet and Xinjiang since immemorial times. Look at the ruin cities of the Silk Road and you will get evidence of the historical presence of Chinese in those areas. Additionally, who has been earlier in Western China, the Han Chinese with thousands of years of history or the Uighurs, who are a branch of the Turkish (Turkey lies in a very distant location from Xinjiang)?
8) Finally, it’s undeniable that protesting with violent means and rioting, aggressing and killing civilians is unacceptable anywhere in the world and that’s what has happened in Tibet in 2008 and last Sunday in Xinjiang. I don’t think that in this regard the decision of the Chinese government of sending the police is any different from any other country. This is something that the advocates of human rights or the supporters of Tibet often forget: in 2008 there are lots of pictures featuring Tibetans with knifes persecuting Han on the streets. This is also unacceptable.
Nobody knows with certainty what really happened last Sunday July 5th in Urumqi,. The Uighur sympathizers argue that there was a pacific protest that was repressed by the police. But this explains the dozens of corpses of Han Chinese on the streets? If you see pictures of the injured people in the hospitals of the city for the riots of that day, what you see more are Han Chinese civilians that are not any different from what I see in the streets or the subway everyday. Civilians killed, is what I see.
But the Chinese government doesn’t do anything to clarify the situation and inform with precision and detail what happened in Urumqi. So far, most of what I am seeing in the Chinese media these days are blames to the Uighur organizations in the US or Germany. According to the media, what happened in Urumqi were the actions of terrorists coordinated from abroad. The problem with this version is that they are not providing any evidence and, what is worse, is that are missing the point: first tell us what happened, who started the violence, who was killed and, among the 156 people death, who were Han, who civilians, who protesters, who security forces? Those details are essential if you want to present the truth, allowing everybody to interpret the facts as everybody wants.
This puzzles me: why the smart Chinese government insists in wasting those golden opportunities to show to the world that they were not the ones who started the violence? Last year, in Tibet, there were clear images of ordinary Tibetans carrying knives in the streets of Lhasa. Why the Chinese government does not denounce that instead of blaming the Dalai Lhama or now, blaming Rebiya Kadeer? It just does not make any sense to me. If the Chinese government only limited itself to highlight the violent character of the protests as well as the dangers that this sort of protests entails for the Chinese people, it would be justifying its need to send the police to control the crisis. That would be smart to do for the Chinese government. But blaming foreign leaders and resorting to the police, only makes appear China as a country where every threat to stability is confronted with military means. CNN is going to show to the world Chinese soldiers police (even if those soldiers are not Chinese, as was the case last year during the Tibet crisis, when CNN used images of the Nepali army beating Tibetan protesters in the Chinese Consulate) but not what was violent in the protests. I think that in this instance, the Chinese government has exhibited a remarkable lack of sophistication.
Is that the Chinese government does not see the damage it auto inflicts to its public image allowing the international media to project images of its police and human rights organizations to criticize it for repressing “the poor Uighurs and the poor Tibetans¨? Probably the answer has to do with the Chinese government preferring to deal with the international media better than attiring a Han ultranationalist reaction when denouncing Uighurs or Tibetans massacring Han. It’s well possible that in fact, what the Chinese government is hiding now, is not the number of “poor innocent Uighurs” killed by the police but the number of poor Chinese walking that day in the streets of Urumqi and killed by “poor innocent Uighurs”.
Something else that I observe is that it seems that the world is now much busier in other matters, such as reactivating the economy or cutting the green house emissions as for having time of bogging China with stories of autonomy of Xinjiang and human rights. In line with this reasoning, China has become a very important partner for the rest of the world, in getting the world economy out of the recession as in helping to stop the underway warming of the planet by industrial pollution. China is an important partner that holds trillions of American treasury bonds and is also a partner whose market demand can reactivate companies such as Airbus. And it happens that the system needs this partner and it’s necessary that the partner is healthy, so let the partner fix the Xinjiang crisis as best as possible. I am seeing this in the moderate reaction in the world to the Xinjiang events. If what I see is true, this is another indicator of the growing Chinese ascendancy in the world. This week, for instance, China was mentioned because the G8 summit meeting and because the Rio (the mining company) scandal. The Xinjiang riots were one story among others.
Finally, the international media show that in these Chinese crisis some journalists, newspapers, opinion leaders and TV channels are the tools of groups of interests that are opposed to the rise of China and that they are going to take advantage of any opportunity to discredit China. China has critics and detractors and these crises are the perfect pretext to talk about human rights, democracy and all that chorus that is normally invoked for criticizing China. In Mexico, my country, for instance, the media is talking about “ethnic war in China”. But, come on, don’t you think that in a country of 1.4 billion people that term sounds like too much?
On the other hand is impossible not to see that without the industrialization, the development of infrastructure, the urbanization and the investment of the central government of China, Xinjiang would not be that different from all its neighbors, from Pakistan to Kyrgyzstan. If you go to Xinjiang, what you see is that Urumqi is a huge city, that there’s a railway that crosses hundreds of kilometers where there’s nothing except desert and in Kashgar you see also that there´s an airport that is much bigger and efficient than the airports of most of Mexico. Like it or not, the Chinese government and the Han have played a civilizatory role in what is now Western China, they have been like the British in India that built all the railways. Like it or not, the Han Chinese and its government are the industrious hand of that area of Central Asia, they have been like the white man in tropical lands. (Actually, when I had this reflection, I thought about at what extent the Chinese are really different from the white man…topic for another time). It’s very likely that in an scenario of one wealthy China not ruling what it’s now its Western edge and one independent Xinjiang, the Uighurs and the Tibetans would be flooding the Chinese consulates trying to get Chinese visas.
In analyzing the long history of hostility between China and its Western “minorities”, especially the Tibetans and the Uighur, there is a basic list of “undeniables” from which you can depart:
1) It’s undeniable that the Han Chinese have been generally racists to the Tibetans and the Uighurs, usually referring to them as thieves or beggars and frequently saying of them that they are dirty and their culture backward. Even the Chinese Communist Party vision of harmony between the Han and the minorities has a certain dose of racisms: in all the official images of the minorities, the Han Chinese depict the minorities as colorful peoples that spend the time dancing. For most of the Han Chinese, the Uighurs are very good at dancing…it’s like, besides that, they are incapable of seeing in the Uighurs or Tibetans something different or something else. This racist Chinese vision of the world translates in the seduction that the white skin and the American culture have on the Chinese versus the general attitude of Chinese looking down at black skinned people.
2) There’s no question that the Chinese central government investment in Western China has all the potential to have a positive impact on the economy, the problem is that this economy, most of the time, has been the Han economy.
3) Closely related with this last point, in Xinjiang and also very possible in Tibet, you have the feeling when you are there that those lands are not China anymore. I am not talking about politics nor saying anything more that what I am saying here, but in Xinjiang the sun raises at least two hours later than in Beijing and the taxi drivers don’t listen to the cheesy pop music of the Taiwanese singers, but instead they like Indian music. As the result of a similar logic, in that foreign land you feel that the Han are the rulers and you feel that the locals are like foreigners in their own land. The ruling institutions function in Chinese, which is not the mother language of the local populations.
4) I don’t think that with all its propaganda directed at creating harmony, the Chinese government has been very successful at integrating Han communities with no Han communities. This is evident in Xinjiang and very evident in Urumqi, where the Han live in one area and the Uighurs in another area, where there are restaurants for Chinese and restaurants for Uighurs. At a certain point this is normal, but in Xinjiang you feel that there are two different communities that don’t talk to each other. Clearly, this is a powerful factor that has created a gap of hostility between these two communities. I don’t have any statistic at hand, but I don’t think that intercommunity marriages between Han and Tibetans or Uighurs are very frequent.
5) On the other hand, it’s also undeniable that the Xinjiang neighborhood is one very difficult to rule. Turn your eyes to Pakistan or Afghanistan, are those countries in peace? Well, those countries were bombings and terrorists attacks are daily currency are just next door to Xinjiang. As a result, the Chinese are not the first to be in conflict with the peoples of that region of the world. Ask the British, ask the Americans if they think that is easy to be in those lands?
6) No matter what the independentists or the secessionist could say about this matter, but Beijing is the ruler of Tibet and Xinjiang and anything is going to change that reality. There have been and there are large Han Chinese populations in those areas and what drives the economy of those territories is the Chinese economic activity. Besides, in a world where there’s a growing number of rogue states, who wants an independent Xinjiang or Tibet? Honestly, there are more important things to do these days.
7) Like it or not, it’s also true that the Chinese have been in Tibet and Xinjiang since immemorial times. Look at the ruin cities of the Silk Road and you will get evidence of the historical presence of Chinese in those areas. Additionally, who has been earlier in Western China, the Han Chinese with thousands of years of history or the Uighurs, who are a branch of the Turkish (Turkey lies in a very distant location from Xinjiang)?
8) Finally, it’s undeniable that protesting with violent means and rioting, aggressing and killing civilians is unacceptable anywhere in the world and that’s what has happened in Tibet in 2008 and last Sunday in Xinjiang. I don’t think that in this regard the decision of the Chinese government of sending the police is any different from any other country. This is something that the advocates of human rights or the supporters of Tibet often forget: in 2008 there are lots of pictures featuring Tibetans with knifes persecuting Han on the streets. This is also unacceptable.
Nobody knows with certainty what really happened last Sunday July 5th in Urumqi,. The Uighur sympathizers argue that there was a pacific protest that was repressed by the police. But this explains the dozens of corpses of Han Chinese on the streets? If you see pictures of the injured people in the hospitals of the city for the riots of that day, what you see more are Han Chinese civilians that are not any different from what I see in the streets or the subway everyday. Civilians killed, is what I see.
But the Chinese government doesn’t do anything to clarify the situation and inform with precision and detail what happened in Urumqi. So far, most of what I am seeing in the Chinese media these days are blames to the Uighur organizations in the US or Germany. According to the media, what happened in Urumqi were the actions of terrorists coordinated from abroad. The problem with this version is that they are not providing any evidence and, what is worse, is that are missing the point: first tell us what happened, who started the violence, who was killed and, among the 156 people death, who were Han, who civilians, who protesters, who security forces? Those details are essential if you want to present the truth, allowing everybody to interpret the facts as everybody wants.
This puzzles me: why the smart Chinese government insists in wasting those golden opportunities to show to the world that they were not the ones who started the violence? Last year, in Tibet, there were clear images of ordinary Tibetans carrying knives in the streets of Lhasa. Why the Chinese government does not denounce that instead of blaming the Dalai Lhama or now, blaming Rebiya Kadeer? It just does not make any sense to me. If the Chinese government only limited itself to highlight the violent character of the protests as well as the dangers that this sort of protests entails for the Chinese people, it would be justifying its need to send the police to control the crisis. That would be smart to do for the Chinese government. But blaming foreign leaders and resorting to the police, only makes appear China as a country where every threat to stability is confronted with military means. CNN is going to show to the world Chinese soldiers police (even if those soldiers are not Chinese, as was the case last year during the Tibet crisis, when CNN used images of the Nepali army beating Tibetan protesters in the Chinese Consulate) but not what was violent in the protests. I think that in this instance, the Chinese government has exhibited a remarkable lack of sophistication.
Is that the Chinese government does not see the damage it auto inflicts to its public image allowing the international media to project images of its police and human rights organizations to criticize it for repressing “the poor Uighurs and the poor Tibetans¨? Probably the answer has to do with the Chinese government preferring to deal with the international media better than attiring a Han ultranationalist reaction when denouncing Uighurs or Tibetans massacring Han. It’s well possible that in fact, what the Chinese government is hiding now, is not the number of “poor innocent Uighurs” killed by the police but the number of poor Chinese walking that day in the streets of Urumqi and killed by “poor innocent Uighurs”.
Something else that I observe is that it seems that the world is now much busier in other matters, such as reactivating the economy or cutting the green house emissions as for having time of bogging China with stories of autonomy of Xinjiang and human rights. In line with this reasoning, China has become a very important partner for the rest of the world, in getting the world economy out of the recession as in helping to stop the underway warming of the planet by industrial pollution. China is an important partner that holds trillions of American treasury bonds and is also a partner whose market demand can reactivate companies such as Airbus. And it happens that the system needs this partner and it’s necessary that the partner is healthy, so let the partner fix the Xinjiang crisis as best as possible. I am seeing this in the moderate reaction in the world to the Xinjiang events. If what I see is true, this is another indicator of the growing Chinese ascendancy in the world. This week, for instance, China was mentioned because the G8 summit meeting and because the Rio (the mining company) scandal. The Xinjiang riots were one story among others.
Finally, the international media show that in these Chinese crisis some journalists, newspapers, opinion leaders and TV channels are the tools of groups of interests that are opposed to the rise of China and that they are going to take advantage of any opportunity to discredit China. China has critics and detractors and these crises are the perfect pretext to talk about human rights, democracy and all that chorus that is normally invoked for criticizing China. In Mexico, my country, for instance, the media is talking about “ethnic war in China”. But, come on, don’t you think that in a country of 1.4 billion people that term sounds like too much?
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