The Yale Globalist: Fringe

GLOBALIST The Yale

Winter 2015 / Vol. 15, Issue 2

Bolivian Indigenous Rights • Palestinian Statehood • Sweden’s Extreme Right

editor’s letter 02

GLOBALIST The Yale

FIND US ONLINE at www.tyglobalist.org @yaleglobalist & tyglobalist@gmail.com

JOURNALISM ADVISORY BOARD Steven Brill, Yale Dept. of English

Nayan Chanda, Director of Publications, MacMillan Center Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, The New American Foundation Jef McAllister, McAllister Olivarius Nathaniel Rich, The Paris Review

Fred Strebeigh, Yale Dept. of English ACADEMIC ADVISORY BOARD Harvey Goldblatt, Professor of Medieval Slavic Literature, Yale University Donald Green, Professor of Political Science, Columbia University

Charles Hill, Yale Diplomat-in-Residence Ian Shapiro, Director, MacMillan Center

Ernesto Zedillo, Director, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization

ON THE COVER

dear

Readers,

What constitutes the periphery is never permanent. Once dismissed as unsavory but safely unelectable reactionaries, European far right parties are now flourishing, feeding off of resurgent nationalism, long-simmering racial tensions, and widespread discontent with European Union austerity policies. In September, Scottish nationalists succeeded in bringing their populist movement for independence from the margins of political discourse to a nationwide vote. This past summer also witnessed the rapid takeover of vast swathes of the Middle East by ISIS, a group whose ideology and brutal tactics are so extreme that even Al Qaeda has wanted nothing to do with them.

The Globalist’s second issue of the 2014-2015 school year investigates these cultures, movements, and peoples on the fringes of mainstream society. Governments’ failure to integrate communities on the periphery can have a devastating effect. Investigating the electoral gains of the Sweden Democrats, Isabelle Savoie finds that the far-right, anti-immigrant party’s recent electoral success can be attributed to more centrist politicians’ failure to engage in any kind of discourse of migration issues for fear of appearing politically incorrect. Meanwhile, Vivian Wang’s feature on the presidency of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous head of state, reminds us that fringes themselves contain their own gradations; whereas the nation’s larger indigenous groups have benefitted from Morales’ targeted anti-poverty interventions, more marginalized communities may stand to suffer at their expense.

This issue could not have come to print without the invaluable aid of our institutional sponsors, the Jackson Institute and the MacMillan Center, and you, our readers. As with all magazines, we depend upon our readership for support. Please consider purchasing a subscription by emailing Executive Director Nitika Khaitan (nitika.khaitan@yale.edu), or reaching out to any member of our editorial board to offer feedback.

Warmly, Zoe Rubin

Photo by Semhal Tsegaye Design by Ivy Sanders-Schneider and Skyler Inman Creative Director Chareeni Kurukulasuriya Production & Design Editors Quyen Do Skyler Inman Associate Editors Skyler Inman, Anna Russo, Christian Soler, Isidora Stankovic, Caroline Wray

Editor-in-Chief, The Yale Globalist

Editor-in-Chief Zoe Rubin Managing Editors Grace Brody, Jackson Busch, Jasmine Horsey, Elizabeth Villarreal Editors-at-Large Rachel Brown, John D’Amico, Adrienne Elliott, Danielle Ellison, Aaron Gertler, Eleanor Marshall, Tara Rajan, Kelly Schumann, Ashley Wu

Executive Director Nitika Khaitan Business Coordinators Mitchell Hightower, Vishakha Negi, Jonathan Reed Online Editors Meiryum Ali, Josh Feng, Jerelyn Luther, Akhil Sud

contents 04

03 contents

Fringe - adj. not part of the mainstream; related to, but not a part of a main group; unconventional, peripheral, or extreme.

06 Q&A:

A Fight For Women

by Women Gender parity in the PKK MARISA LOWE

Too Mainstream For Comfort The rise of an extreme right-wing political party in Sweden ISABELLE SAVOIE

A Nation of Many Stripes Colombia’s controversial peace process

14

ELIZABETH MILES

08

An apolitical festival in a country consumed by politics

39

MEGAN TOON

The Red Corridor The origins and future of communism in India

Morales’ Identity Crisis The delicate balancing act of Bolivia’s first indigenous president VIVIAN WANG

The Edinburgh Fringe

ELEANOR RUNDE

12

07

39

Unrest in the West Bank A photo story

SEMHAL TSEGAYE

23

Putin’s Encore

Russia’s expansionary policies in Estonia MICHELLE KELRIKH

Michele Malvesti

TYG sits down with the counterterrorism expert and Yale professor

06

GLIMPSE:

FEATURE:

17

At Water’s Edge

19

PHOTO STORY:

Bo-Kaap

A lens into the “Rainbow Nation” WA LIU

Greece’s struggle to balance environmental and economic concerns EMMA PLATOFF

VISHAKHA NEGI

26

A Poisonous Legacy

43

U.S. efforts to address Agent Orange contamination in Vietnam

Q&A:

Rami Nakhla

The roots of Syria’s turmoil—an interview with Yale World Fellow and Syrian Peace Activist Rami Nakhla ALEJANDRA MENA

ZOE RUBIN

35

An(other) Inconvenient Truth FEATURE:

27 winter 2015, issue 2

2014 Globalist Photo Contest Finalists

Rwanda, Kagame, and the moral discomfort of the West ALLIE KRAUSE

www.tyglobalist.org

05 fringe

Putin’s Encore

A Russian Orthodox church looms over a local souvenir shop in Talinn, Estonia (courtesy Flickr user Sue Martin).

Is Estonia the next Ukraine?

BY MICHELLE KELRIKH

A Fight for Women

by Women

fringe 06

A Picture of Parity Among Genders in the PKK

BY MARISA LOWE

U

ntil recently, Estonia was a mere dot in the Northern Baltic, the property of the Danes, the Swedes, and, until the early 1990s, the Soviet Union. But since gaining independence in 1991 it has made a name of itself despite its tiny population of 1.3 million (the same number as the population of Dallas, Texas). This new member of the European Union (Estonia joined in May of 2004) boasts the invention of Skype and the first use of safe web voting in elections and digital citizenship.

Yet the country’s entrance onto the world stage has been accompanied by new dangers: in April 2007, a series of major cyber-attacks shut down websites of the Estonian Parliament, banks, and ministries, followed by the September 2014 kidnapping of Estonian security official Eston Kohver. Both incidences were traced back to Russia, an ominous aggressor in the wake of the Crimean crisis.

Estonia’s ties to Russia extend further than its Soviet-occupied past, but even with roughly a quarter of Estonians tracing their roots to Russia, the Russian-Estonian population “neither desired nor believed that anything similar [to the Crimean situation] would or could occur in the Baltic,” David Smith, a Professor of Baltic History and Politics at the University of Glasgow, argued. In an interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty magazine, Oleg Uglov, an ethnically Russian table tennis manufacturer in Estonia, praised the ease of business transactions and the lack of corruption in the country.

“You can feel confident they won’t come for your [business] tomorrow. They won’t take anything away or change the laws in such a way that it’s really difficult to do business,” Uglov said. winter 2015, issue 2

The Estonian government is increasing its efforts to make Uglov’s pro-Estonian sentiment commonplace to counteract Russian advances.

This can be difficult given the weakness of Estonian identity among its isolated Russian communities, some of which are 90 percent Russian.

In these communities, children attend school where Russian is the primary language, and everyone engages with the Russian media.

The battleground of the war of Russian encroachment lies in citizenship. David Cameron, director of EU studies at Yale, contended that Russia “had been making noise for some time about offering Russian citizenship and some financial support to those who don’t have Estonian citizenship.” Estonia is disadvantaged in the tug-of-war for Russian-Estonian citizenship. In 1992, about 32 percent of ethnic Russians in Estonia were stateless. At the time of Soviet independence, proficiency in Estonian, ranked by the US State Department as one of the three most difficult languages to learn, was required, as well as a mastery of the Estonian Constitution. The stringency of these requirements was so severe that when Estonia first applied to join the European Union in 1995, the EU postponed Estonia’s membership until it relaxed its citizenship procedures.

The easing of the citizenship process has largely been a success: the number of stateless Estonian residents had dropped to a mere 7 percent by the end of 2013. Kristo Ment, an Estonian student at Yale, explained that the Estonian government “provides subsidized language programs, and the amount of Estonian one needs to know is far less than it used to be.” Estonia has also launched a joint Russian-language Bal-

tic TV channel to attempt to disseminate Russian media dominance. Ment believes that the Estonian government is doing enough to help its Russians become Estonian citizens, if they so desire.

But Cameron does not think this is sufficient to resist encroachment. “There can be no doubt that language has been used and is used now deliberately to exclude the ethnic Russians from citizenship.” Although citizenship is now more easily attainable, Putin has used the continued isolation of ethnic Russian communities to criticize the Estonian government for failing to meet its responsibilities to its Russian peoples.

Russia ostensibly is trying to protect the Russians abroad, but in light of the Crimean crisis, Putin’s ambitions may be more far-reaching.

Regardless of whether or not Putin wants Estonia, it remains difficult to predict whether he will pursue it. In April 2007 and September 2014, Russia showed its aggressive tendencies.

And with a bully as large and stubborn as Russia, David Smith argued that the tug-of-war over Russian Estonians may be irrelevant: “The Ukraine crisis shows us that if Russia [cared to] to interfere in the domestic affairs of the Baltic States, it would do so regardless of the wishes and concerns of local Russian inhabitants.” But Estonia is not another Crimea: the country has important allies in the European Union and NATO. The future for the Baltic battleground may uncertain, but it looks likely that Estonia and the European Union will be fighting back.

Michelle Kelrikh ’17 is an Ethics, Politics, & Economics major in Morse College. Contact her at michelle.kelrikh@yale.edu.

I

Two fighters of the PKK descended from the Quandil mountains for a local celebration (courtesy Flickr user Nora Miralles).

n the east of Turkey, “she went up the mountain” is a common phrase among Kurds. It describes the journey from the tribal villages to the cave-filled mountains, a process of relinquishing your possessions for an austere lifestyle, a commitment to a new life with a gun by your side, and membership in the Kurdistan Workers Party, or the PKK. While the literal and metaphorical use of going up the mountain is used in other regions such as Pakistan, the prevalent use of this term to describe women is unique to the Kurds.

Currently, women make up half of the PKK’s leadership and have proven to be intensely committed fighters within the militant organization.

Women are unorthodox violent actors—even in the United States, women make up only 16 percent of the armed forces , and they continue to lack opportunities for frontline service and advancement. By comparison, 40 percent of PKK fighters are women. For them, joining the PKK represents an opportunity to demonstrate their commitment to Kurdish independence and escape what are often restrictive tribal villages.

While conventional and scientific norms view women as physically weaker and less aggressive than men, the PKK has sustained itself as an unconventional yet successful fighting force. The PKK was founded in Turkey in 1978 to fight for Kurdish cultural and political rights and, ultimately, independence. After forty years of fighting, the organization is finally in negotiations with the Turkish government, and its forces have recently served to protect populations in Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Given the location of the PKK’s training camps in Syria and its close

ties to Kurdish organizations in Iraq and Syria, its defensive fight against ISIS is natural.

The radical acceptance of women in the PKK stems from the organization’s Maoist roots. Egalitarianism is taken very seriously.

Dov Friedman, a graduate student who studies the PKK at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, described life within the organization as “monastic, spare, and austere.” Personal belongings are minimal if not nonexistent. Romantic relationships are strictly forbidden, and all PKK members are celibate. The grassroots insurgency’s decision to involve women in combat can be attributed to “ideology but also necessity,” Friedman said. “In a rag-tag group listed as terrorists, you do what you can and make do.”

Integrating women into the insurgency has not been without difficulties. Initially, women were paired side-by-side with men, but after sexual assault problems arose, the PKK discarded this method. At the height of the PKK’s violent efforts against Turkey in the 1990s, women often acted as suicide bombers. About 73 percent of its suicide bombers were women, while only 22 percent of the PKK’s operatives were women at the time. In a period when it remained unclear how to best make use of women in the field, women in the PKK proved their commitment and effectiveness to the cause with their lives.

Recent media attention by Western news outlets has honed in on the PKK’s female soldiers and glorified their forceful movement against ISIS. But while this phenomenon should be highlighted, the notion of this strong ideologically opposing force rising up against ISIS is “quite troubling” according to Gulay Turkmen,

a PhD candidate at Yale studying religious and nationalist identities in the Middle East. The organization’s founding and continuing purpose remains equal rights for ethnic Kurds within Turkey, and the PKK should not be thought of as a reactive organization to the rise of ISIS. Moreover, the idea of the PKK as a haven for women from restrictive Islamic cultures is misleading. As Friedman noted, Kurdish villages are “restrictive but not fanatical.” Any restrictions towards women are more likely to be caused by the rural, tribal nature of these villages than any conservative or radical Islamic traditions.

The co-ed forces of the PKK do not represent a new, reactive ideal of equality, but rather one that has continued to exist and thrive throughout the tumult of the past half-century.

Memin Saka ’17, a Turkish Yale undergrad from Istanbul, remarked that the existence of women in PKK forces “doesn’t make a huge difference.”

“I don’t think it changed what people thought about the PKK,” Saka said. He personally finds the PKK distasteful “because they have always caused trouble in Turkey.”

The existence and persistence of the PKK has meant that an entire generation of youth has grown up with the image of women and men effectively fighting side-by-side. Turkmen feels that with the rise of ISIS and its refusal to grant women rights, the PKK’s use of female fighters is particularly noteworthy: “The involvement of women in this conflict is seen as a sign of a better, more equal world the [Kurdish forces] could offer against the ideology of ISIS.” Marisa Lowe ’17 is in Pierson College.

Contact her at marisa.lowe@yale.edu. www.tyglobalist.org

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Too Mainstream For Comfort

A

s I sit around reading a book during my summer vacation to Sweden, as the TV drones in the background, I hear a beautiful Swedish folk song coming from the screen. I look up to see idyllic scenes flitting by: children dancing around a maypole and adults clad in traditional dress. Ah, yes, I think to myself. I’m back. Then, following these pastoral scenes comes text: “Keep Sweden Swedish.

Vote for the Sweden Democrats.” I head to YouTube and search up previous SD campaign ads. The results are quite shocking, and some of the comments left by the party’s supporters are laced with a bitter hatred for immigrants that I have never before witnessed. I ask myself, how can such a party have gone from being a near non-entity a mere decade ago to occupying airtime on national television in this left wing, social-democratic home of the Ektorp sofa?

Founded in 1988, the Sweden Democrats (SD) were once seen as a party on the fringes of the Swedish political spectrum. “Oh, they’ll never gain any momentum,” Swedes would say.

“Don’t worry about them.” When the party then gained sway in the May 2014 European elections, the fear that SD was well on its way to becoming mainstream took hold. This was in no way out of the question; the party had already passed the four percent threshold necessary to occupy parliamentary seats in 2010. Come September as I watched the parliamentary election results roll in, I was shocked. SD’s share of the popular vote had risen from six percent to nearly 13 percent. In some districts that make up Skåne, the province where my family is from, they garnered as much as 30 percent of the vote—more than any other party in the running.

This, to me, was wholly absurd—what rationale could possibly lie behind this unsettling shift to the far right?

The Sweden Democrats campaign on a platform of “tradition and security” and see themselves as the only party that offers real change on a number of issues. At first glance, their policies seem acceptable, even progressive. They want to protect the environment. They want to build better infrastructure. They want to create better healthcare, childcare, and eldercare systems. It all seems great, until you realize that they only envision these policies in a culturally homogenous Sweden. To quote from their platform as it concerns immigration, “the net effect of mass immigration from far away countries is incredibly negative, both economically and socially” as opposed to “immigration from culturally and geographically similar countries.” SD has vowed to offer financial assistance to any immigrant who feels that he or she wants to return to his or her native land. “Keep Sweden Swedish,” indeed.

David Cameron, a professor of political science at Yale and the head of the university’s European Union (EU) Studies program, explained that “the Sweden Democrats have grown in support primarily because of their strong opposition to Sweden’s generally progressive stance regarding immigration.” Voter dissatisfaction with the center-right Moderaterna party and the general nationalist tide now sweeping Europe have also contributed to SD’s rise My mother hails from Skåne, where the Sweden Democrats enjoy the most support, and it upsets her, as it does me, to see support for such a party in the province she calls home.

In her opinion, Sweden is sometimes too politically correct, which hinders open, robust conversation about how to take in immigrants and resettle refugees with successful results. In recent years, there has been an influx of migrants from the Middle East. Most seek refugee status and are often without financial means or higher education, making it even harder for them to acclimate to the Swedish lifestyle and culture.

Unfortunately, many end up in the same poor suburbs, places where the possibility of integration, in terms of learning Swedish and finding employment, becomes even less likely. Citizens and politicians alike often avoid conversations about such issues for fear of being labeled racist—a tendency that my mother feels has become engrained in the Swedish mindset as of late. She believes that people who are uneasy about current immigration and refugee resettle-

fringe 08 How an extreme right-wing party in Sweden has managed to gain traction, and why it terrifies me

Morales’

BY ISABELLE SAVOIE ment policies may turn to SD because it is the only party that is openly vocal on these issues.

Anna Broström, a member of the Feminist Initiative party, comes from the district of Sjöbo, where the Sweden Democrats obtained a staggering 23 percent of the vote in 2014. She echoed my mother’s sentiments, adding that SD is gaining power due to growing inequality in Sweden. She attributes this to the past eight years of conservative fiscal and social policies, which have particularly affected social welfare programs. Broström feels that people are looking for a scapegoat, and the immigrant population is a perfect target, especially since Sweden was previously a very culturally homogenous society.

Broström is hopeful, however, that the newly elected social-democratic government will repair some of these inequalities, and that the Sweden Democrats’ voters may realize that the party’s platform is an incendiary response to policy issues that can be fixed through open and non-xenophobic discussion. The left-leaning ruling coalition, headed by the Social Democratic Party of Sweden, wants to pressure the EU to adopt policies so that all member nations equitably share the financial burden associated with refugee intake. They also wish to resettle new refugee arrivals more evenly within Sweden, so that no one district will have to shoulder an unmanageable financial burden. Additionally, they want the Ministry of Immigration to expand its financial commitment to supporting each district’s efforts to improve organized activities associated with refugees’ arrivals.

Serious work must be done over the next few years to maintain Sweden’s incredible historic openness. An unabashed and honest discussion needs to be had between Sweden’s political leaders and its citizens, without the fear that such conversations will be seen as politically incorrect. Otherwise, SD will only continue to gain traction. And quite frankly, perceived political incorrectness that yields results can sometimes be necessary—especially when remaining silent could have devastating consequences not only for the Swedish political climate but also for the country at large.

Isabelle Savoie ’17 is in Davenport College.

Contact her at isabelle.savoie@yale.edu.

[Left] Sweden Democrats campaign poster (courtesy tvardrag.se). [Above] Swedish landscape (Savoie/TYG).

Identity Crisis The Delicate Balancing Act of Bolivia’s First Indigenous President

BY VIVIAN WANG

T

he streets of Cochabamba, Bolivia are lined with ritzy car dealerships and greasy street stalls. College students clad in jeans and t-shirts walk alongside short, wrinkled women swathed in colorful shawls and bearing giant cloth sacks on their backs. A ride on the trufi, or microbus, is filled with the familiar sounds of Spanish mixed with the unfamiliar sounds of Quechua, one of Bolivia’s several dozen indigenous languages. Cochabamba is a city with an identity crisis.

About 62 percent of Bolivia’s population self-identify as indigenous. Cochabamba, located in the Andean altiplano, or highlands, is home to the Quechua people, the largest indigenous group in the country. The Aymara people also make their home in the altiplano.

Together, the Quechua and Aymara people form nearly 90 percent of the country’s indigenous population; the remaining 10 percent is made up of the country’s 34 other recognized indigenous groups, who largely reside in the eastern lowlands. Over the past few decades, as Bolivia has undergone rapid urbanization, cities like Cochabamba have offered glimpses into a centuries-old tension between the indigenous majority and an elite, wealthy minority of European descent, who trace their ancestry to the 16th century Spanish conquest.

A child studies Huma Marca, Bolivia (courtesy Flickr user UN Photo/AF).

Cochabamba is also the place where Evo Morales, the country’s current president, first rose to national prominence in the late 1990s and early 2000s as an activist and union leader in the cocagrowers industry. Reelected by a 60 percent landslide to a third term this past October, Morales—or “Evo,” as he is affectionately known—is the country’s first indigenous president. An indigenous president for one of the world’s most diverse countries—an obvious step in the right direction for a culture with a long history of repressing and discriminating against its native population.

Or is it?

Morales, a member of the Aymara people, campaigned on a platform of, among other issues, promoting indigenous rights. During his time in office, extreme poverty (which has historically been most prevalent among the indigenous population) has declined by more than 43 percent. A recent United Nations report found that Bolivia had the highest rate of poverty reduction in Latin America from 2000 through 2012. In a 2009 referendum, Bolivians ratified a new constitution that declared their country to be a “plurinational” state with 36 official indigenous languages in addition to Spanish, and in 2010, Morales signed a “Law Against Racism and Any Form of Discrimination.” His slogan

for his most recent campaign was “Juntos vamos bien para vivir bien,” or “Together We Work Well to Live Well.” Sixty years ago, indigenous people were not allowed to set foot into the main square of the country’s capital city; now, an indigenous man has received a sweeping mandate to hold office for a third term. Both Morales’s supporters and critics say (or admit) that Bolivia’s indigenous people have made unprecedented strides in the past decade.

The question is whether this progress is sustainable. Beneath the sweeping rhetoric and grandiose legislative gestures, some still wonder whether Morales really has the indigenous peoples’ interests in mind, or if he is more concerned with political self-preservation. They point to recent clashes between indigenous groups and Morales’s government as proof that Morales will only help the indigenous people when it suits his purposes. Does Morales have the right intentions? And if the indigenous people are benefiting anyway—does it matter?

I

first encountered the complex political situation of Bolivia’s indigenous people this past summer, when I spent six weeks working for a NGO in Cochabamba. I befriended a local college student, Pablo, and we took a weekend trip to the capital city of La Paz. www.tyglobalist.org

9 fringe

From Top Left Clockwise: An Aymara woman looks over Copacabana (courtesy Flickr user Adam Jones), a TIPNIS rally in March (courtesy Flickr user Candelaria Herrera Vasquez), a Quechua girl (courtesy Flickr user Frank Kehren), the skyline of Cochabamba (courtesy Creative Commons). winter 2015, issue 2

fringe 10 We were walking through the city when I noticed a huge billboard overhead. It depicted a smiling man in a construction worker’s hard hat and featured information about an upcoming October election. Pablo explained that the man was Evo Morales, the country’s president, and that elections were in a few months.

When I asked Pablo what his opinion was of Morales and who he was going to vote for in October, he shrugged. Morales is controversial in some circles, he said, for his socialist policies and background as a leader of the coca growers unions. In other circles, he is hugely popular for that same union leader background. Many laud his efforts on measures such as the anti-discrimination law and the nationalization of Bolivia’s extensive natural resources—which was done, Morales has constantly said, for the good of the indigenous people and their pachamama, or Mother Earth.

In the particular billboard I saw, Morales wore a worker’s construction hat; in other billboards, he is shown in indigenous garb. But the message is the same: he is a man of the people.

And the people love him. He enjoys widespread public support, especially among the rural, indigenous lower classes—“which ends up being the great majority of the population,” said Gabriela Morales (no relation to the president), a Yale graduate student in anthropology who specializes in Bolivia.

Pablo was indifferent to Morales, but Pablo is not of the rural, lower-class indigenous people. Demographically, he more closely resembles the people of Santa Cruz, the largest city in Bolivia. Located in the eastern part of the country atop huge reserves of natural gas, Santa Cruz has historically been one of the richest areas of Bolivia, contributing over 35 percent of Bolivia’s GDP. Its residents are largely of European descent. When Morales was first elected in 2005, his plane could not even land in Santa Cruz, Gabriela Morales tells me, because local opposition to his election was so widespread. In fact, the department of Santa Cruz tried to secede in 2007. Pro-secession activists cited concerns over Morales’s attempts to control Santa Cruz’s oil and natural gas sources, but many of their arguments were “couched in a lot of racially fraught language,” Gabriela said.

Yet something seems to have radically shifted between then and now. In October’s election, Morales won the department of Santa Cruz for the first time, with almost 49 percent of the vote. Morales’s populist platform and economic reforms, it would seem, have won over even his most fervent critics.

For Jaime Aparicio Otero, a former Bolivian ambassador to the United States, this shift

is not that innocuous. He points out that while Morales may have made gains in Santa Cruz, his percent of the popular vote actually went down in La Paz—the seat of the Bolivian government and a hotspot of indigenous activism—from over 80 percent in the 2009 election to just under 70 percent this year. If Morales has won over Santa Cruz, Aparicio said, it is not because of his push for indigenous rights. It is because of power and money.

“Morales realized he could avoid having an opposition if he negotiated with these economi-

In many ways, Morales’ stated goal of protecting the indigenous way of life is fundamentally at odds with the source of his widespread popularity: a financial boom based on a successful extractive economy cally powerful people [in Santa Cruz],” Aparicio told me. “They work in all these private sectors, all kinds of people, from smugglers to bankers, making a lot of money. So [his vice president] went to them and said, ‘Continue doing your business, but don’t get involved in politics. You choose. You do money or you do politics.’”

The businesspeople, Aparicio says, chose money.

“Now if you put the opposition in jail or exile them or do whatever you want, nobody cares,” Aparicio said. “People care about their lives and their salaries, so nobody complains about the lack of liberties or freedom of expression. That’s the reality. [Morales’ government is] using the indigenous label to do things that are authoritarian. They are using the state to give handouts to people that make them dependent on the state.”

But those handouts are exactly what have improved the indigenous people’s quality of life.

Both through Morales’ own policies—nationalizing natural resources and imposing high taxes on foreign companies—and a natural economic boom, Bolivia’s finances have never looked better: the size of Bolivia’s economy has tripled under Morales. And the indigenous people are feeling the direct benefits.

Under Morales, the government has redistributed over 134 million acres of land; indigenous and peasant populations now collective-

ly own one-third of all regularized land in the country. A booming consumer economy has led supermarket sales to grow sixfold since Morales took office; restaurant sales have grown nearly 700 percent. And after Morales nationalized hydrocarbons in 2006, he announced that the government had a generous budget surplus, which was going to be put toward bonos, or cash handouts, to schoolchildren, pregnant women, and the rural poor—who are almost exclusively indigenous.

Put simply, “government investment in rural areas...is the highest it has ever been,” said Linda Farthing, author of three books about Bolivia’s recent development.

For all of Morales’ moves to empower indigenous people—from inviting traditional shamans to his inauguration to incorporating indigenous cosmologies into educational systems—the real root of his success is money, money, money. Bolivia’s economy is booming, and Morales has been lucky enough to ride the wave.

“Bolivia is living in a party now,” Aparicio said. “But what will happen when the party is over?”

F

or a glimpse of what might happen when the party ends, Aparicio points to the TIPNIS highway controversy. He calls it proof that Morales is only the indigenous champion he claims to be when it suits his political purposes.

In 2011, Morales held an inauguration ceremony in the tropical town of Villa Tunari to celebrate the beginning of construction on the Villa Tunari-San Ignacio de Moxos Highway.

The Villa Tunari-San Ignacio de Moxos Highway—or the TIPNIS highway as it has come to be known—is a project that seeks to connect the agricultural region of Beni with the commercial department of Cochabamba. It aims to resolve Bolivia’s dramatically underdeveloped internal transportation system and is highly popular among coca growers and businesspeople, who see it as a means of lowering transport costs in Bolivia’s booming export economy. The 135-mile TIPNIS highway would allow for unprecedented economic development and reduce a 15-hour drive to just one hour.

It would also cut straight through the heart of the Bolivian Amazon and the home of the TIPNIS indigenous people.

TIPNIS, an acronym for the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory, is a vast national park in the center of Bolivia. It is populated by three small indigenous groups—the Tsimané, the Yuracaré, and the Mojeño-Trinitario—who, unlike the majority Quechua and Aymara, do not have a history of political activism and influence. www.tyglobalist.org

12 fringe 13

11 fringe The TIPNIS people see the planned highway as the precursor to deforestation, resource exploitation, and, inevitably, an end to their way of life.

The TIPNIS peoples’ opposition culminated in August 2011, when nearly 2000 activists marched on foot from Beni all the way to the governmental palace in La Paz—a 375-mile trek that took over a month.

Halfway, they were met by the police.

Some 500 Bolivian police officers fired rubber bullets and unleashed tear gas on the protesters, children and pregnant women among them.

The officers loaded the marchers into trucks and buses, and even tried to force some of them onto airplanes to be flown back to TIPNIS. Still, the marchers persisted. When they finally reached La Paz, they were met by tens of thousands of supporters, who lined the streets in a carnival-like show of solidarity. The citizens of La Paz waved flags and held posters, shouting, “Bievenidos! Welcome!” Morales claimed no responsibility for the police crackdown and announced that he was canceling plans for the highway’s construction.

Over the past few years, however, Morales has repeatedly vacillated between bringing the plans back to life and canceling them again. His government has engaged in various consultations and meetings with the TIPNIS people, and in 2012, he announced that the plans were on hold until extreme poverty was successfully eliminated from the area. He committed $14 million over the next three years for investment in basic services and sustainable development.

He has stated that at the end of the three years, he will invite an international body to evaluate whether he has met his goals. For many indigenous leaders, however, the anti-poverty measures are just a facade to appease international opinion before Morales proceeds with his plans.

In many ways, Morales’ stated goal of protecting the indigenous way of life is fundamentally at odds with the source of his widespread popularity: a financial boom based on a successful extractive economy. To reconcile the two, Farthing said, is “extremely difficult if not close to impossible.”

The situation also highlights an underlying tension behind Morales’ pro-indigenous rhetoric. While Morales supports groups like the Quechua or Aymara whose goals have largely aligned with his own, his government has not tolerated political autonomy on the part of other indigenous movements, explained Sinclair Thomson, a history professor at New York University who lived in Bolivia for several years.

When Morales found that he could not co-opt certain indigenous groups whose viewpoints winter 2015, issue 2

Map of Bolivia and TIPNIS (courtesy Flickr user Daniel).

differed from his, “the government resorted to hardline tactics...used by military and neoliberal governments that [Morales’ party] has replicated for purposes of state control,” Thomson told me.

For Aparicio, the crisis simply reveals Morales’s true intentions.

“Even though Morales has been speaking in the UN about pachamama, talking about indigenous rights and signing all the declarations about indigenous rights, the moment he could prove that he believed in that, he did exactly the opposite,” Aparicio said.

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n my very last night in Bolivia, a few locals I had befriended suggested that I attend a celebration of the solsticio. The winter solstice is the Aymara new year, and every year thousands of Bolivians and tourists alike flock to the Puerta del Sol, or Door of the Sun, outside of La Paz to watch the sunrise, make offerings, and celebrate a new agricultural year. I couldn’t make it all the way to La Paz, but at three in the morning two friends and I took a taxi to a town an hour away to participate in the festivities.

Somehow we must have gotten the wrong address. Instead of a raucous crowd of people waiting to usher in the new year, we found a quiet temple with two old women chewing coca leaves to pass the time. The temple looked just like a church, topped with a cross, filled with flickering candles, but none of the portraits hanging on the walls referenced Jesus. Instead, they honored unfamiliar names and stories. That sanctuary was a meeting of the two worlds within Bolivia, a melding of European influence and indigenous tradition.

As sunrise neared, more and more people

gathered. Some came by car, bringing sleeping bags and blankets. Others arrived on foot. An hour before sunrise, an elderly man called everyone together around a campfire. He spoke for a long time, about tradition and blessings and a new year. Two men brought a llama to be sacrificed. Finally, as the sun started creeping over the mountains, we stood in silence in the cold winter air, watching light spread over pachamama, Mother Earth.

Maybe Gabriela is right when she says it was inevitable that an indigenous president would come to power in Bolivia. Or maybe Morales is special—a revolutionary, charismatic leader who was able to capitalize on social unrest at the right place and time. Maybe Morales does have the people’s best interests in mind and will be able to reconcile economic growth with indigenous tradition. Maybe he only cares about power. For now, it may seem that it doesn’t matter; if the indigenous people are benefiting, are Morales’ true intentions important? To answer that question, we must look to what transpires when, as Aparicio says, “the party ends.” Thousands of the country’s indigenous have already seen what happens when their rights and traditions no longer align with Morales’ vision of a booming Bolivia—and for them, the answer to that question matters very much. Either way, that wintry morning in a town whose name I don’t remember sent a clear message: the Bolivian indigenous people are here to stay. Juntos vamos bien para vivir bien.

Vivian Wang ’17 is an English major in Timothy Dwight College. Contact her at vivian.y.wang@yale.edu.

Members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) march in favor of the Party in West Bengal (courtesy Al Jazeera English).

The Red Corridor Tracing the origins and future of communism in India

BY VISHAKHA NEGI

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n April 6, 2010, eighty officers from India’s Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and a small group of local policemen were killed in the deadliest assault ever by the Naxalite movement. “They seem to have walked into trap,” Home Minister P. Chidambaram told reporters. In the aftermath of the attack, Kartam Joga, a probminent Maoist activist was arrested for allegedly planning the attack. In reality, his party had never condoned such behavior. Outcry from Amnesty International about the “fabricated” evidence surrounding Joga’s arrest eventually led to his acquittal.

Yet, both the actions of the Naxalite movement and the Indian government’s misguided response illustrate the precarious political climate that more mainstream Indian communists must navigate today.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M)—not to be confused with the CPI(Maoist)—was formed in 1964 to oppose the “neo-liberal economic policies which have led to a growing economic divide,” according to a more recent party manifesto. During the 1960s, CPI(M) sought to gain voters throughout northeast and southern India in regions that were poor, rural and in dire need of economic empowerment. Although its agenda was peaceful, some party cadres resorted to violent, unau-

thorized tactics.

Citing instances of such violence, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi actively suppressed freedom of speech and had many political opponents arrested, especially those with any communist affiliation. In the face of unjust government tactics, the communist movement faced not only an uphill battle to gain legitimacy but also internal ideological divisions over how to respond.

As a result, in 1967, a segment of CPI(M) went on to form a more extremist, grassroots movement known as Naxalism, its name derived from an infamous peasant revolt in Naxalbari, West Bengal. That year, desperate peasants had taken up bows and arrows to protest oppressive landholder practices, only to be crushed by overwhelming police force. Their slogan of “Land for the Tiller” caught on among the educated youth of Calcutta. “The seventies was the decade of revolution [among] American campuses…

French intellectuals,” Civic Chandran recalled.

A former Naxalite, Chandran now edits an alternative journal on new social movements. “A young intellectual from a lower middle class, [I was] also attracted to revolutionary movements.”

Through friends already involved, Chandran joined the underground guerilla movement, editing and publishing a literary magazine. In

1975, Gandhi declared a nationwide “Emergency,” claiming broad authoritarian power to rule by decree in order to crackdown on “internal disturbance.” Chandran cited the two-year long “Emergency” as inspiration for his radicalism; he was detained during the period.

Different communist movements quickly spread across what came to be known as the “Red Corridor” of India—states with some of the lowest standards of living in the country like Bihar, Chattisgarh, and West Bengal. Over time, however, government tactics succeeded in marginalizing Naxalism and the more mainstream CPI(M) to a few southern states. “In the elections following independence the CPI and the communists in general were a major political force, and would regularly come second in elections across the country,” said Tariq Thachil, an assistant professor of political science at Yale University whose research focuses on South Asia. “And then very quickly they were reduced to strongholds in West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura.”

In recent years, the political power of Left has further dwindled. In this past election for the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian parliament, the Left could not agree on a single agenda or course of action. Unlike in West Bengal, where the CPI(M) dominates most elecwww.tyglobalist.org

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A district committee building for the Communist Party of India (courtesy Flickr user runran).

Notably, there are also growing concerns of idealism that is to blame for the demise of tions, control over the state of Kerala regularly over corruption within the Left, a faction that the Left. shifts between the Left and the more centrist ostensibly holds to the highest standards of “People aren’t necessarily looking for a modIndian National Congress Party. honesty and economic equality.

Last October, el,” said Professor Subramaniam. “Sometimes Thachil explained that “because of [the alSamar Acharjee of Tripura, an official within people are drawn towards anti-corruption and ternation in parties], it’s too early to say that simplicity as has been seen with [preCPI(M) is completely out of Kerala polvious movements by] Anna Hazare. itics.” However, he added that in West Others are quite happy to go with fairly Bengal there has been a lull after unincorrupt leaders like Jayalalitha, Mayavati, terrupted dominance, and that perhaps and the Gandhis as long as they feel parthe party “is finding its way out.” ties are doing something for people like Perhaps with an increasing number them.

They are looking for patronage and of economic opportunities previously beneficial policies.” unimaginable to many Indians, the poor Ultimately, in order to keep up with would willingly put away the hammer a country with a fast-changing economy, and sickle and hitch a ride on India’s much as to be changed about the way the new, more unified boom in capitalism. communist movement reached out to However, many poor migrants to urban marginalized individuals. areas face discrimination and that the Civic Chandran himself wrote a opportunities provided by such a fasthighly controversial play in the mid paced economy disproportionally bene1990s, “Ningal Are Communistakki?” or fits those who are not as marginalized.

“Whom did you make a communist?”

Furthermore, the fast-paced economic The play questioned whether mainstream growth and urbanization disproportioncommunism was dedicated enough to ately harm marginalized groups who fighting the patriarchy and helping the choose to stay on rural, mineral and redalits, or those of low caste. source-rich lands.

Chandran feels that Indian leftists Says Civic Chandran, “Any kind of The Red Corridor in India, 2007 must seek out a post-Marxist ideology. communism, including Maoism will not (Wikimedia Commons) “Communism analyzed [the] industrial survive in India because India is differrevolution and searched an alternative, ent. [We have] to confront many identithe Communist Party, took a “funny” video with but the industrial revolution is over,” he said. ties & issues especially land, gender, caste, [and] his friends where he laid in $24,000 worth of “Marxists should learn from new young activists nationality questions…” cash—a small part of the $110,000 USD he had and update themselves to the challenges of gloThere has also been rising discontent at gotten from government contracts—and joked balization age, or I fear Marxists will [become] states governments with communist parties in power to provide economic success. For exam- about making enough money to create a bed of dinosaurs of the past.” ple, despite initiating a massive and well-imple- bills.

Inevitably, the video ended up going viral, Vishakha Negi ’17 is a Molecular, Cellular, mented redistribution and literacy program for and Acharjee was ousted from the party. and Developmental Biology major in Morse some of the best healthcare access and highest His actions stand in stark contrast to the beCollege. Contact her at male and female literacy rates in India, Kerala’s havior of model communist leaders like Manvishakha.negi@yale.edu.

CPI(M) has been largely unsuccessful at raising ik Sarkar, popularly dubbed “the poorest Chief the overall wealth or average income in the state.

“They are good at having the pie slit more Minister in India.” Sarkar is considered the face equally,” said Professor Thachil, “but less suc- of integrity and honesty in an otherwise murky political sphere. But perhaps it is this very sense cessful in growing the overall pie.” winter 2015, issue 2

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A Nation of Many Stripes

Colombia’s controversial peace process to end Latin America’s longest war

BY ELIZABETH MILES

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olumbian newspapers often carry a photo of photos, held up on posters glued with white carnations—photos of faces, printed in grainy black and white, all soldiers. These hundreds of soldiers float from the hands of their relatives, a sea of people wearing white. Those soldiers have been missing, for seven, ten, twenty years.

Another sea of people, this time wearing their national colors of yellow, blue and red, cheered on a triumphant James Rodriguez, the 23-year-old top scorer and leader of an underdog football team, called Los Cafeteros for Colombia’s world famous coffee production.

Rodriguez led Colombia to the quarterfinals of the World Cup, where they were defeated by Brazil. A Buzzfeed article, “How To Dance As Awesomely As The Colombian Soccer Team,” featured GIFs of the team salsa dancing after scoring a goal. Los Cafeteros captured the spirit of the world’s soccer fans.

Colombia is a nation of contradictions. The country’s flag has a yellow stripe for gold, a blue stripe for the seas that surround it, and a red stripe—for blood. Colombia is no longer derisively known as drug lord Pablo Escobar’s home address, but it remains gripped by a decades-long civil war. Growing at almost seven percent in 2014 while Latin America flagged at less than two percent as a whole, this nation of coffee and emeralds is also the world’s largest cocaine producer. While Colombia’s politicians

Rainbow over Bogotá (courtesy Flickr user Otto Nassar). lead negotiations on the post-2015 UN development goals, many policemen and soldiers remain hostages, held deep within the jungles, taken during the civil war that has persisted for nearly half a century.

Now Colombia’s leaders are attempting to eliminate the conflict that has torn the country apart by negotiating a settlement for peace.

Colombian voters remember decades of conflict, and scattered, unsuccessful attempts to resolve it, notably under President Andres Pastrana Arango in 1998. If peace can be achieved, Colombia has demonstrated its potential to race ahead, to develop exponentially and lead in international forums. But first, Latin America’s longest running war, one that has caused cities to decay into shacks, thousands to suffer limb amputation from landmines, and hundreds of thousands to die, must end.

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olombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos can often be found in Havana, Cuba, negotiating with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country’s largest armed guerilla movement. The FARC has held unofficial control over sectors of the country since 1966, and only ten years ago, ruled a third of the country. While the FARC claims to be a Marxist-Leninist force defending Colombia’s rural peasants from oppressive landholders, it has links to funding from the lucrative drug trade.

Colombia reels from war between the FARC,

rightwing paramilitary groups and the army, all of which have been accused of intimidation, violence, and human rights violations. Santos wants to end the conflict through negotiation, but the idea of compromise is difficult to accept for relatives of those killed and captured. The peace process does not include the numerous paramilitary groups, or directly address the accusations of retaliatory behavior leveled at the government.

Though the stakes involved in the process threaten to divide the country further, Santos’s plan does have some optimists on its side. Yale World Fellow Paula Moreno, former Colombian Minister of Culture and president of Manos Visibles, a nongovernment group that seeks to empower urban youth and women, believes that Colombians still possess an indefatigable hope for peace. “Trying to achieve a peace process is something that we must do, that we must try as much as is needed.” Mauricio Rodríguez, a mediator in the peace talks and a former Colombian Ambassador to the United Kingdom, noted in a 2014 interview with The Guardian that more than 250,000 people have died in the conflict, and more than five million have been displaced: “How can we just tear up the peace process when we are so close, after all these years of killing?”

But Semana, a leading Colombian magazine, recently declared that “el pesimismo se mantuvo estatico,” or “pessimism remained unchanged.” In www.tyglobalist.org

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15 fringe February 2014, prior to Santos’s reelection, the were killed, and many high profile hostages were percentage of Colombians sure that the peace released. Uribe chose to rise above the fray in talks would fail rose in number from 41 to 57 military helicopters, leaving negotiations by the percent. A great majority of Colombians polled wayside.

by Semana did not care about success or failIn 1998, his predecessor, President Pastraure, instead hoping to scrap peace talks entirely na attempted to negotiate peace, granting the and see all combatants in jail. About 60 percent FARC a demilitarized zone the size of Switwished to see FARC fighters, demilitarized or zerland. But the government was accused of not, imprisoned, and two-thirds did not support allowing paramilitary groups to continue fighttheir participation in politics. ing with impunity against the FARC, and the In a country where FARC was accused five million people of rearming and supSantos wants to end the have seen their housporting the drug trade es burned and their its safe zone. The conflict through negotiation, from land seized, where evnegotiations stalled but the idea of compromise and finally ended in eryone knows someone who’s been held The governis difficult to accept for rel- 2002. at gunpoint, seen a ment then declared a atives of those killed and bombing, or been war zone, and a state kept captive in the of emergency after captured. jungle for years, peace bombings in Bogota is hard to negotiate, killed twenty. or even to talk about. Colombians marched in Around this time, my aunt and uncle, born, 2008 through the streets of Bogota, chanting raised, and working in Colombia left the coun“No mas FARC,” or “no more FARC,” but the try. My cousins, now beginning careers in the question of how to demobilize the group is not United States, are products of a thoroughly so easy to unify around.

American education. I myself, born in the U.S. to a Colombian mother, did not return to Coet, peace is being talked about. Negotialombia for four years, after spending half my tions on the current five-point draft accord childhood visiting my family there. I have a began in 2012 with the help of Cuba, Veneblank, a place where the record skips, between zuela, Chile and Norway. The accord’s second photos of a toddler in the countryside, and then and most controversial point would include the a much taller stranger wearing braces in front of FARC in political participation—allowing the the same ancestral house. group to attempt to gain votes within the elecElisa Martinez, an undergraduate at Yale, toral system, rather than control small pockets was born in Colombia but has spent most of of the country through means that range from her life in the U.S. She remembers suddenly local sympathy to landmines. Santos would avoiding the countryside around Bogota where bring the FARC into mainstream Colombian her family used to vacation. “It was only when I politics as a party. was much older that my parents told me it was The fifth point would be the most difficult because it had become too dangerous to drive to carry out. Known “demobilization, disarmaalong those highways because of La FARC’s ment, and reintegration,” or DDR, the language presence in regions nearby.” calls for the return of demilitarized FARC fightBut many Colombians, including my family, ers to society. In recent years, combatants who have returned to the country. The government had agreed to lay down their arms have pleaded lauds safer conditions, attributing reduced viothat they were soon abandoned—denied access lence to Uribe’s hardline policies. In 2008’s Opto job training or education, alienated from their eracion Jaque, the Colombian army rescued Incommunities, left by the government without grid Betancourt, a former presidential candidate means or sympathy—even though they had who had been held in the jungle for six years, chosen to end their role in the violence. along with other high profile captives. I remember following the rescue on television, in Tunja, resident Alvaro Uribe, who held ofhearing cheering behind the news anfice between the administrations of two chor and in the streets below my grandpeace-seeking presidents, Andres Pastrana mother’s windows. As the hostages came Arango and Santos, pushed the FARC by force farther into the jungles, sometimes even over the border into Ecuador. Under his leadership President Juan Manuel Santos (courtesy of from 2002 to 2010, numerous FARC leaders Flickr user Ministerio TIC Colombia).

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winter 2015, issue 2

home, the country believed, for the first time in decades, that change was coming. The operation inspired its own television mini-series, so people could relive it.

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uring Uribe’s presidency, rebel combatant numbers fell from 25,000 to 7,000.

In 2012, Santos, who was Uribe’s Minister of Defense, completely reversed the latter’s plan of attack. As the FARC declared a two-month ceasefire, peace talks began. In late 2014, Santos expected to sign a peace treaty by the end of the year.

Santos finished second in the first round of voting during his reelection campaign. He ran a narrow campaign, stating that his “main reason to seek re-election [was] the possibility of ending a conflict.” He won in the second round—the day after Colombia won a World Cup match, 3-0 against Greece. When asked if James won the election for Santos, Nestor Osorio, Colombia’s current ambassador to the U.K., would only smile before skirting around the issue. Though Colombians have mobilized as a nation, marching in the streets for an end to the conflict, the lack of enthusiasm among voters suggests that not all believe in Santos’s ability to achieve peace through dialogue.

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f Santos did sign a peace agreement, the symbolic end alone would boost Colombia’s already skyrocketing importance on the world stage. “Colombia—in spite of everything—has achieved unprecedented progress over the last years on matters ranging from security and fighting poverty, to economic performance,” Santos told the United Nation’s General Assembly in 2013: “Imagine how much more we could do without it [the civil war]!”

When we spoke, Amb. Osorio highlighted the evolution of Colombia’s political priorities. Once focused almost entirely on internal defense, combating the proliferation of drug trafficking and guerilla activity in the 80’s and 90’s, Colombia recently served as president of the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council, or ECOSOC. Just as James has risen to become a star in the soccer world, Santos, in Osorio’s opinion, has bolstered his international reputation by expanding Colombia’s participation at the highest levels of global dis-

Protestors march against the FARC in 2008(courtesy Flickr user medea_material). cussions on poverty, health, and development issues.

At the same time, Colombia has become, in Osorio’s words, “an outwards economy,” joining the Pacific Alliance trade bloc. It includes Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru, bringing in more trade and more tourism and together racing ahead of Brazil—in the end, Colombia may get its revenge for that World Cup elimination in dollars. In all of Latin America, Colombia is growing the fastest. It has brought down the unemployment rate for 47 months in a row—all while dealing with the conflict. Colombia is part of a new regional configuration of power, and its economic weight now outstrips oil-rich Venezuela and debt-ridden Argentina.

But the peace process, according to Osorio, “is key to tourism and to agricultural productivity—industries that rely on two avenues, security and economic development, coming together.

The moment Colombia manages to get rid of the conflict, we will have a great capacity… with its exceptional resources, it’s more than emerging market.”

Moreno agreed that the peace process would change the international image of Colombia, but she noted that the aftermath of any deal will remain complex. “Peace is the dream come true, but in the peace process, we are expecting the social forces to just organize themselves,” she told me. “We need to organize them.” She fears the new forms of conflict that may persist beyond the label of “war,” a culture of violence remaining unchanged. The street gang intimidation and extortion that plagues many of Colombia’s cities, an outgrowth of poverty once closely linked to spillover from civil conflict, is independent of the war now. Even as many industries

Policí a Nacional de los Colombianos keeps watch after burning a cocaine factory near Tumaco (courtesy AP Photo/Flickr user William Fernando).

in Colombia stand to benefit from increased access to global markets, the economic prospects of individual towns, small business owners, and laborers will not be solved by a peace agreement alone.

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n an August interview with Slate, Santos was presented with a dilemma: a FARC leader will not lay down his arms, knowing he will go to jail, yet a Colombian must see him go there, because the FARC killed his father. The interviewer asked him what he would do with that leader, returning him to the firestorm that led to his near-defeat in July’s presidential elections.

“I cannot give you that answer,” Santos responded. “I have to give this answer to people at the negotiating table.”

Santos told Slate he intended to present Colombia with “the whole package” of costs and benefits associated with a peace agreement.

“People will go for the benefits,” he concluded.

Martinez is more cautious. “I think the key issue now is how deep and old the wounds are on both sides,” she said. “For a lot of Colombians, just forgiving the members of La FARC and allowing their peaceful assimilation into society without punishment is a pill too bitter to swallow.”

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he government has stated that the accords must be accepted in full, or rejected; all five points must be included in any agreement with the FARC. It will take an extraordinary effort just to achieve an all-or-nothing consensus between the two parties. But if the peace accords are completed, and then put to the people as a referendum, will the positive spirit of

Colombia’s global future, embodied in James’s triumphant salsa dancing, inspire them to vote Santos’s way again? Or will they remember the soldiers whose faces are now only honored through photographs?

The day-to-day negotiations fluctuate wildly.

In early November 2014, the FARC kidnapped the highest-ranking military officer they had ever seized. In response, Santos suspended the peace process. After the general’s release, Santos promised renewed discussion. The negotiations slide back and forth, as does the country, between pessimism and optimism.

Colombia’s past is woven with a stripe, red for blood—but originally, that stripe symbolized the blood shed in Colombia’s fight for national independence. The flag has two more stripes, yellow and blue, symbolizing the country’s material and natural wealth. Colombia has waterfalls and deserts, ten percent of the world’s biodiversity, intensely loud music, many of the world’s purest emeralds, a festival of pickup truck sized flower displays that halt traffic for days—its own stripes found nowhere else.

Moreno thinks that hope will surmount any tensions over the concessions that government negotiators may need to make. “Since we have suffered so much, I think it will be extremely difficult to say no, if we have the chance. From the emotional part of the country, I don’t think people will say, ‘I don’t want this,’ ” she explained.

“Even if it’s imperfect, [the current peace negotiations are] the chance that we have.”

Elizabeth Miles ’17 is in Jonathan Edwards College. Contact her at elizabeth.a.miles@yale.edu. www.tyglobalist.org

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a conversation with

MICHELE MALVESTI A Jackson Institute Senior Fellow and counterterror expert discusses gender, media, national security

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YG: In your experience, how has the role of women changed in national security over the past twenty years?

MM: One challenge in properly answering this question is the definitional problem of what constitutes “national security.” Through the years, and certainly over the past decade, our conceptions of national security have greatly expanded to include a range of non-traditional issues, including natural disasters, the depletion of natural resources, and transnational organized crime. Accordingly, it can be challenging to readily and easily define which positions are national security positions. That said, let’s look at women in one national security arena, the Intelligence Community, and one organization in particular, the CIA. According to a 2013 unclassified report issued by the Agency, women composed 38 percent of the CIA’s total workforce in 1980; today, women compose upwards of 46 percent. The trends are positive, but women are not equally represented in the leadership ranks: the same report also showed that women compose 31 percent of the Senior Intelligence Service officers. There has been greater recognition that this is a problem, however, and I fully encourage and support the efforts of the leadership who, as noted in the report, are developing institutional and structural reforms—such as incentivizing alternative career tracks and implementing flexible work arrangements – in order to achieve greater equality and diversity in the senior leadership positions.

Let’s look at women in the armed services.

Today, women compose approximately 15 percent of the US military, and their formal roles certainly have expanded and evolved, particularly after the first Gulf War. Over the past twenty years, women have come to fly combat aircraft, to serve on submarines, and to participate in cerwinter 2015, issue 2

(courtesy Jackson Institute).

BY ELEANOR RUNDE

tain ground operations. In 2013, then-Secretary women who carved a path for me follow. of Defense Leon Panetta announced the rescission of the direct ground combat exclusion rule TYG: Is it frustrating to be defined, first and for women. By 2016, we will know if the services foremost, as a “female” national security exwill continue to request that some positions re- pert? Do you feel that the cultural focus on main closed. your gender has Regardless, distracted from the women hisachievements and torically have accomplishments of Over the course of my career, I been present you and your female have seen women ascend to the on battlecolleagues in nafields, and highest levels of the national se- tional security? they have Frustrating curity apparatus. And I recognize MM: fought and to be characterized died in seras a female national and appreciate that I have been vice to the security expert? On the beneficiary of opportunities nation. I look one level, no. While forward to I would certainly that have flowed from a generaseeing what debate the use of the tion of national security women these women word “expert” in this will continue who carved a path for me follow. case, I fully recognize to accomand appreciate that plish. in an overwhelming F i n a l l y, majority of instanclet me also note that when I was serving as the es, the portrayal of me as a “female national seSenior Director for Combating Terrorism on curity expert” is meant to be flattering and to the National Security Council staff, I had the connote accomplishment. Yet on another level, privilege to work for two strong, incredibly hard such terminology highlights not the fact that I working, and highly accomplished woman at the am woman, but rather that I am not a man. This White House: National Security Advisor Con- is a distinction with a difference. When we add doleezza Rice and Homeland Security Advisor the “female” adjective, it serves to highlight that Fran Townsend. In fact, my office dual-reported it is unexpected to see a woman in the senior to both women. Prior to that time, most of the ranks of this field. And while it is true that the senior leaders in the organizations in which I number of women serving at the highest levels had worked had been men. So, over the course of national security remains disappointing, the of my career, I have seen women ascend to the use of that particular terminology can, in certain highest levels of the national security appara- circumstances, serve to reinforce social assumptus. And I recognize and appreciate that I have tions or expectations that men are more properbeen the beneficiary of opportunities that have ly or naturally geared to operate in the national flowed from a generation of national security security field.

TYG: There is a clear public conception that Americans working in national security are forced to live on the fringes of society because of the sensitive nature of their work. After the release of Zero Dark Thirty in 2013, you argued in Forbes and on CNN about how dangerous disclosure of confidential information can be. To what extent do you think operatives in national security are excluded from mainstream society?

MM: The highly sensitive work of most national security professionals does place these public servants outside the American mainstream in various respects. Yet in many instances, this positioning on the fringe can bring added scrutiny and increased public attention that actually forces them into the mainstream. Since you raised Zero Dark Thirty, let’s look at US Special Operations Forces, or SOF, as a case in point.

SOF are trained to operate in hostile and denied territories, often under conditions of significant political and physical risk. In going where others cannot go and doing what others cannot do (as is often said), SOF truly are operating at the fringe, at the outer limits. Yet the clandestine nature of their work and the strategic significance of their missions have triggered a thirst in the public to know ever more about the secretive world of SOF. This, in part, drives sensationalized media accounts, unauthorized books, and blockbuster films about Special Operations. Those in the mainstream might think this increased visibility honors those serving in SOF, but in some instances it can actually lead to harmful repercussions.

TYG: What types of repercussions?

MM: When warriors who operate primarily in the shadows....at least a handful of ways, as noted in the Forbes and CNN pieces you referenced, are thrust into the public spotlight—especially when they do not seek the spotlight—it has the potential to produce inadvertent and haphazard risks in at least a handful of ways.

First, sensitive and even classified information is at risk of being exposed. This is of particular concern for unauthorized media accounts.

When we shine light on tactics, we constrain the ability of these forces to operate optimally in the future. If identities are exposed in the course of production, we place their lives and those of their families at risk. Second, public attention— which is often focused on one specific unit, individual, or mission to the exclusion of many others—can ferment internal divisions that can lead to resentment. Public accounts can also lead to competing claims of personal credit, as we have witnessed in the recent public sparring over who shot Bin Laden. Internal discord can

media books and films tend to brandish highly dramatic and ostensibly glamorous operations, such as rescuing hostages, killing terrorists, or undertaking other edge-our-seat actions. This is understandable in the vein of sporty entertainment. Yet these exceptionally narrow and often violent depictions of force undermine public understanding of the full spectrum of military capabilities that exist in service to the nation.

In 1980, 38 percent of the CIA’s workforce was female

Today, over 46 percent is female

... but only 31 percent of Senior Intelligence service officers are women degrade the trust and cohesion that are necessary for collective action, which lies at the heart of SOF’s success. Third, excessive accolades can also unintentionally increase the allure or appeal of using these forces among policymakers, including for missions better done by other forces or which divert SOF from focusing on missions they are uniquely qualified to execute. SOF are already stretched incredibly thin. While impressive in their capabilities, these forces do not have unlimited capacity, and we must guard against their over- or misuse. And finally, mainstream

TYG: Considering the substantial pressure on security organizations to disclose information to the public and the ease of sharing with modern technology, is it still possible for American security organizations to operate entirely on the fringes of society? How much responsibility does the public have for maintaining the secrecy of these organizations?

MM: No, I do not think it is possible for the national security apparatus of the United States to operate entirely on the fringes of society. Even more important, I do not think it should operate entirely on the fringes. Let’s take, for instance, the US intelligence community, especially in the counterterrorism arena. The government has a responsibility to apprise the American people of the terrorist threats confronting the nation and of its strategy for deterring or defeating those threats. These issues cannot be relegated to the fringe but must be incorporated into our mainstream debate and dialogue. Admittedly, there will be some specific, highly detailed information that must remain out of the public domain, such as operational details that might compromise the effectiveness of a mission, or the identities and locations of operators, agents, or sources. But we cannot present a false choice between security and transparency. Just this past summer, the 9/11 Commissioners called on national security leaders to strengthen their communication with the public. The words of the Commissioners implicitly give the sense that they, too, are aware of a leery divide between the general public and those working at the fringe to keep us safe. Let me read directly from one of their recommendations: “In this era of heightened skepticism, platitudes will not persuade the public. Leaders should describe the threat and the capabilities they need with as much granularity as they can safely offer.” In my opinion, a democratic society should not be cut off from either its military or the larger security apparatus, and a public that is well-versed on issues of national security can make more informed decisions and serve as a wellspring of resiliency.

Eleanor Runde ‘17 is an Ethics, Politics & Economics major in Ezra Stiles College.

Contact her at eleanor.runde@yale.edu. www.tyglobalist.org

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BO-KAAP A lens into the “Rainbow Nation”

B

o-Kaap, a neighborhood in Cape Town, South Africa, is one of the historic centers of Cape Malay culture. Under the cloudless, peacock-blue sky, the brilliant shades of the neighborhood’s houses form a magical scene—one that would not seem out of place in the pages of a fairy tale. Yet this kaleidoscope of colors masks a far more complicated history The neighborhood traces its origins back to the 16th century, when Dutch traders transported people from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Africa as slaves to the Cape of Good Hope. Their descendants, known as “Cape Malays,” have resided in the area ever since. Although Bo-Kaap’s

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bright colors had cultural significance for many of the enclave’s original inhabitants, it was not until apartheid ended in 1994 that the residents were allowed to buy their own houses and personalize them. In the late 1990s, many chose to paint their homes the bright greens, blues, and pinks we see today, both as a symbol of their new-found freedom and as a nod to their new roles in the “Rainbow Nation.”

Nowadays, Bo-Kaap is a small residential area with a population of around 6,000—more than 90 percent of whom are Muslim, and many consider the multi-colored houses to be a celebration of Ramadan and the Eid. Although

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BY WA LIU

Bo-Kaap is the most significant Muslim community in Cape Town, gentrification and tourism increasingly test the neighborhood’s working-class, multi-ethnic identity. Bars, cafés, and new residents have streamed into Bo-Kaap, raising property values and taxes.

Beneath the fantasy-like façade, Bo-Kaap faces serious challenges. Yet for now, children continue to chase around along the street, and the cheerful hues reflect their exuberant play.

Wa Liu ’17 is a double major in Art and Anthropology in Timothy Dwight College.

Contact her at wa.liu@yale.edu.

www.tyglobalist.org

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At Water’s Edge Greece’s struggle

to balance environmental and economic concerns

BY EMMA PLATOFF

The coast of Cephalonia, Greece (courtesy Flickr user Berit Watkin).

I

FREEDOM OF BEACH

n July, the average temperature in Attica, the district of Greece that includes Athens and Cape Sounion, is almost 30 degrees Celsius or 90 degrees Fahrenheit. This means when you walk somewhere, you should expect to arrive at your destination sweating. This means you shouldn’t be running until after the sun has already set.

Yet this summer, Agis Emmanouil, a wellknown Greek actor, spent five searing July days running 240 kilometers along the scenic Greek coastline, always with a smile on his face. Emmanouil did so to combat a new draft bill, presented in April 2014 by then Minister of Finance Yannis Stournaras, which proposed allowing the commercialization of all 13,676 kilometers of Greek coastline and encouraging developers to build up to ten meters from the water. The draft law, “Delineation, management and protection of the seashore and beach” would have legitimized the bars and resorts that have for decades been built illegally on beaches, absolving their owners of any wrongdoing. It would also have allowed for the modification of the coast through processes like dredging and filling, removing silt and refilling areas with sand in order to reclaim sea for land. The bill blatantly contradicted several existing European and international environmental protection laws, and also, strikingly, the Greek constitution,

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which guarantees its citizens free and unlimited access to the coast.

Greeks are proud of their beaches. Along with ancient monuments like the Parthenon and Aristotle’s Lyceum, they are what attracts tourists—which contributes nearly twenty percent of Greece’s gross domestic product (GDP).

In a 2014 survey, 97 percent of Greeks reported that protecting the environment is important to them personally. The fact that beach access is a right enshrined in the nation’s constitution is telling as well. Over 150,000 citizens signed an online petition promising to “stop the sell-out of Greek beaches to private companies.” Letters decrying the law poured in from international environmental policymakers. As a result, only part of the bill was voted into law in August, including a provision that grants illegal property owners loopholes to adjust the boundaries of the coastal zone, effectively narrowing the zone in which construction is not permitted. Environmentalists say they are watching carefully for a time when policymakers might try to enact the rest of it through other more covert procedures.

A press release on the Mediterranean Association to Save the Sea Turtles (MEDASSET)’s website framed the situation best: “Greek leaders seem to believe tourism infrastructure is in more need of protection than the unique Greek nature that is actually attracting tourists.”

A

EUROPEAN PRESSURES

ccording to Liza Boura, MEDASSET’s programs and advocacy campaigns officer, this law is just another way in which Greek policymakers prioritize financial issues over environmental ones. Since the financial crisis, Greece has had to make efforts to comply with European Union-imposed economic adjustment programs in order to continue receiving loans, including the directed improvement of certain sectors of the country’s economy. The Memorandum of Understanding for the Second Economic Adjustment Program specifically calls on Greece to promote land use for economic development—hence the idea of coastal development. But the proposed law conflicted with several other E.U. policies protecting coastal regions.

Stavros Kalogiannis, Greece’s former state secretary for the environment, regional planning and public works and a current member of the Hellenic Parliament, said that after six years of a deep economic recession, economic issues are the priority for both the state and its citizens.

“In general, the crisis has provided this ungrounded justification to watered down environmental policy and laws,” Boura said. “Investments can be made without too much of an environmental impact assessment.”

The crisis hasn’t helped, but this environmental negligence isn’t new, according to Ioli

Christopoulou, who has been working with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Greece for the past decade. Though she said that Greece was never a “leader in environmental issues,” she noted that before the crisis there was greater public pressure and advocacy for environmental issues, and that the government had made steady progress to meet European standards.

Those European standards, however, may also be in decline. In July, during her tenure as Europe’s Commissioner for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, Maria Damanaki came together with then Commissioner for the Environment Janez Potočnik to write a letter explaining that any efforts Greece made to develop land for economic purposes needed to comply with existing environmental protection limits. This letter and others like it discouraged the Greek Parliament from passing the entirety of the draft bill proposed to commercialize the coast. This edict— merely a reminder to follow existing laws—was effective, but the policymakers behind it have recently left office.

According to an open letter by several European non-governmental organizations, the restructuring of the European Commission following Jean-Claude Juncker’s election to its presidency in May 2014 demonstrated a diminishing commitment to the environment. The governing body used to include a vice president for energy and several commissioners individ-

ually governing action, maritime affairs and fisheries, and the environment. Now, for the first time in 25 years, there is no commissioner devoted solely to the environment. Instead many environmental considerations been combined into just two commissions: Environment, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries and Climate Action and Energy. The latter body will be led

by Miguel Arias Cañete, who is known to hold shares in oil companies. Environmental NGOs are hardly the only organizations disputing his conflicts of interest.

According to environmentalists, even the governing bodies that remain focused on the environment aren’t doing quite what an ocean-lover might hope.

“For the marine issues, the new trend is ‘Blue Growth,’” Boura explained. “It’s not healthy seas—it’s ‘Blue Growth’: how can we grow more by using marine resources? It’s a clear trend towards growth being the priority rather than sustainable development.”

In a September letter to the members of the European Parliament, Juncker wrote that the reformatting was an attempt to consolidate issues, like economic and environmental matters, and encourage collaborative efforts to combat common problems. Juncker wrote, for example, that, “environment and maritime conservation policies can and should play a key role in creating jobs, preserving resources, stimulating

growth and encouraging investment.” Similarly, Kalogiannis explained that several environmental laws in Greece have been altered for the sake of simplification.

But to some, these statements feel stale and disingenuous.

“Of course, government representatives do talk about the environment. It is on their agenda. But when it comes down to choosing how to develop, [policies] do not seem sustainable and does not seem to take into account the environment,” Boura said. “On the ground we’re not seeing theory put into practice.”

However, Kalogiannis said it makes sense that the economy is being prioritized.

“It is natural for the Economic Adjustment Programs to focus more on the economy than the environment as nowadays this is the primary goal: to save the country,” he said.

Kalogiannis also noted that Greece already implements the European environmental legislation—some of the most stringent in the world.

Christopoulou identified the diffusion of responsibility that occurs when two distinct but overlapping powers determine a country’s policy as another problem with the international government structure. She described a “tug of war” between the Greek government and the “troika”—a commonly-used term for the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank, the three orwww.tyglobalist.org

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26 fringe ganizations governing Greece’s financial future.

The troika instructs Greece to remove barriers to economic growth and blames Greece when these initiatives hurt the environment. After all, the country chooses the specific policies. But the troika, Greece argues back, is the force mandating these economic efforts in the first place.

The blame, Christopolou says, is probably shared, but the power dynamic is complicated.

Especially given the new structure of the European Commission which came to power early this November, the resolution remains unpredictable.

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GREECE IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

he Environmental Performance Index put out every year by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network ranks 178 countries around the world, using 20 different indicators in two major categories (environmental health and ecosystem vitality), weighted by their importance, to give each country overall and issue scores. In 2014, in keeping consistent with its position throughout the last decade, the United States ranked 33rd. Greece was 23rd.

According to Jason Schwartz, an environmental performance analyst for the index, this is “not a bad rank at all.” It’s actually quite good, he said, all things considered. Given Greece’s recent environmental track record, this may come as a surprise, but the high ranking may be a product of the limitations of the metric itself. Schwartz explained that because the index is generalized based on many contributing factors, a country’s good performance in one area may disguise its blatant negligence in another.

“Weighting is a major factor here,” he said.

For example, while Greece may not give its coastal habitats the attention they deserve, Schwartz explained that other factors valued more heavily in the generalized index have the potential to obscure these areas of negligence.

Four times the weight given to a country’s treatment of Marine Protected Areas, for example, is assigned to a section called Health Impacts, in which Greece is ranked number one. But this high rank is largely just the product of being a first world country—Greece shares the top title of the Health Impacts category, whose sole indicator is child mortality, with twenty-one other developed nations.

Conversely, some of Greece’s ostensibly innocuous rankings may be misleading. In terms of marine protected areas, Greece is ranked 58th—“firmly in the middle of the pack,” according to Schwartz. But this isn’t a particularly winter 2015, issue 2

impressive pack, he added; for the most part, no countries are treating these sacred areas as carefully as they should be. In cases like these, then, relatively unassuming rankings may disguise huge problems.

Many of the positives apparent in these rankings may also come despite, rather than because of, the government. Boura noted, for example, that Greek seas are among the cleanest of any European country, but that this is probably because it is a less industrialized country than many of its neighbors. Similarly, the financial crisis may have played a part in improving Greece’s sustainability efforts, as common citizens with monetary struggles sought to be as

“Greece has amazing ecosystems, amazing seas, amazing forests, and the crisis has been a problem, but we’re still working to turn [it] into an opportunity for a more sustainable future.” energy efficient in their own homes as possible.

K

LOOKING FORWARD

limis Klimentidis founded the company Klimis in Kalamata, Greece in 1968. The small family business still manufactures lime for construction projects and biomass products for heating use today, but its particular specialty, called a “Klimis barbecue briquette,” is a unique charcoal substitute made from the dust residue of burnt olive pits — in Greek, “pirinoskoni.”

The briquettes, an entirely natural source of energy, emit thirty percent less carbon than their sootier counterpart. This year Klimis was selected as a National Champion representing Greece in the United Kingdom’s Trade & Investment Award for Innovation category of the 20142015 European Business Awards.

Despite the company’s success, Marketing Manager Makios Nasos said there are great challenges associated with working in the company’s birthplace.

“Unfortunately in Greece there is no reward to companies that demonstrate excellence in environmental protection,” he explained. “In order to become more ‘green’ as a company you need money to invest [in] new technologies. But this is not possible for companies that struggle to

survive.”

For Klimis, Nasos said, trying to innovate in a green way is one strategy for penetrating the world market. The barbecue briquettes also fight climate issues like deforestation and rising greenhouse gas emissions by providing a more environmentally sound alternative. Green companies are fighting against the challenges of the crisis, but it’s not an easy method, Nasos added.

It’s hard to predict where anything will be in ten years, but perhaps especially difficult when looking at Greece’s environment. A great deal of Greece’s environmental future rests on the shoulders of the country’s younger generation, —which, Boura says, is thus far developing its businesses in a much more ecologically sensitive way. There are new businesses in fields like greener accommodation and transportation, beauty products, organic food and more.

There is also promise, some say, in the across the board initiatives that the WWF has in mind, what the organization calls “horizontal” efforts.

In October 2013, the nongovernmental organization published a roadmap laying out policies to achieve a more sustainable future for the country. According to a statement made by WWF’s international president Yolanda Kakabadse, “it is WWF’s firm belief that the crisis offers a unique opportunity for the elaboration of integrated national roadmaps to sustainability.”

The proposed changes range from the legal realm—greater transparency, knowledge, participation, and accountability in legislation—to economic affairs—revamped tax systems that make polluters pay, re-establishment of the Social Economy Fund to provide start-up funding to sustainable and transparent new enterprises, redirection of the European Central Bank’s funding to priority areas like energy and regional development. Demetres Karavellas, chief executive officer of WWF Greece, describes these tasks as simple in theory but difficult to achieve; according to their organization, it is exactly actions like these that will revitalize Greece’s battered economy and natural treasures.

Despite efforts of this kind, and those of companies like Klimis, with the effects of climate change mounting, it remains impossible to know what lies ahead, especially with a government as uncertain as Greece’s.

“Greece has amazing ecosystems, amazing seas, amazing forests, and the crisis has been a problem but we’re still working to turn [it] into an opportunity for a more sustainable future,” Boura said. “The public is realizing it. The key is to get the decision makers to realize that too.”

Emma Platoff ’17 is in Morse College. Contact her at emma.platoff@yale.edu.

The Roots of Syria’s Turmoil

BY ALEJANDRA MENA

An Interview with Yale World Fellow and Syrian Peace Activist

RAMI NAKHLA

R

ami Nakhla has advocated for political reform in Syria for a decade.

His work took on a new urgency after the beginning of the Syrian uprising in 2011, when he was forced to flee the country out of fear of government persecution. Alejandra Mena ‘17 sat down with Nakhla to discuss the roots of the Syrian conflict, the role of technology and social media, and the steps that can be taken to bring about lasting change.

TYG: After nearly four years of fighting, what do supporters of the opposition now want?

RN: The pro-opposition and the pro-regime camps both want to put an end to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). ISIS is bad for everyone. The Syrian opposition has been fighting ISIS since before the U.S. got involved— they have won so many battles and lost so many battles. The Syrian regime and ISIS, on the other hand, have never clashed, except in two small battles. There is almost a silent agreement between them. ISIS basically benefits the regime, because it gives them more credibility in comparison. The regime is seen as willing to fight terrorists; this is why the regime has let them grow.

TYG: What is the ideal outcome for the pro-opposition forces?

RN: Those in favor of the opposition want the U.S. to conduct airstrikes against the regime.

They argue that this is necessary for peace because the ongoing conflict between the regime and the rebels supports the formation of more

groups like ISIS. Without addressing this, they say, we can get rid of ISIS, but another group will replace them. I can see their point of view, but I disagree in that I don’t think the Assad regime should be bombed. In the past, the regime has coordinated its own airstrikes with U.S. airstrikes to increase collateral damage. If the U.S. targets one area, the Syrian regime will send an airstrike into the surrounding civilian neighborhood to increase collateral damage, which people will attribute to the U.S.-led bombing campaign. People start to flip against the United States. Even though they want to get rid of ISIS, they see that the collateral damage is too huge.

Also, people will start becoming skeptical of the real intentions of the United States during these strikes. Syrians were calling for intervention for four years, but the United States didn’t do anything. But now because there is a threat to the U.S. from ISIS, the U.S. decides to intervene.

The Syrian people understand that the United States is looking out for its own interests.

TYG: n a talk at Yale’s Asian American Cultural Center you mentioned the importance of technology in jumpstarting your career in political activism. What role has technology and social media played in the conflict?

RN: Revolutions will happen with social media or without, but in Syria it might happen twenty years from now. It will take more time for the dissent to develop and raise social awareness enough to revolt against the regime. Social media has helped us expedite this process and has helped us to overcome one of the major challenges, which is communication. For example,

The Syrian flag (courtesy Flickr user Nicholas Raymond). when police started shooting civilians in Daraa and killing people, within five minutes, it was online. Within ten minutes, it was all over the mainstream media. Syrian people, in Hama, in Daraa, in Damascus, all other Syrian cities, saw these horrific scenes on TV and knew what was going on immediately. But social media also plays in your enemies’ favor. ISIS uses this tool to reach out to more people and recruit members. They use social media to make themselves popular, widespread. By being so horrific, showing the beheadings of American journalists, they knew they would make headlines. They were smart in using social media. Evil, but smart. In the long run, social media has more advantages, but in the short run it can be a huge price.

TYG: What immediate steps need to happen in Syria to allow for change?

RN: We should push for a ceasefire; not request it—but demand it. You cannot gently ask any party to do this; each side strongly believes they can win it, and they will push. Our only way out of this conflict for certain is to find a way to live together. We can keep warring for ten years, twenty years, until we reach that threshold where we are tired enough that we agree to find a way to live together. For many Syrians, every fighter is fighting because that guy killed his sister, that guy killed his cousin. This is why we must demand a ceasefire.

Alejandra Mena ‘17 is in Silliman College. She can be reached at alejandra.mena@yale.edu.

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Category: People

Photo Contest Finalists

Meet the finalists of the Fall Photo Show sponsored by The Yale Globalist and The Yale Photography Society Name: Stephanie Heung Class Year: 2015 College: Calhoun Hometown: Boca Raton, Florida Category: People Title: Shadow A Berber man sits on a dune in the Sahara Desert. Taken in the Erg Chebbi dunes in southeastern Morocco.

Name: Julia Gilbert Class Year: 2018 College: Davenport Hometown: Montpelier, Vermont Category: People Although it’s often oversimplified into a celebration of colors or a case study in misfortune, India is a hugely complex, diverse, and dynamic subcontinent.

I met this girl in Pushkar, Rajasthan, just a few blocks away from streets packed with vendors selling souvenirs to foreign tourists.

I don’t know her story, but I know she is growing up in a world of great contrasts and contradictions.

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29 fringe (Top, Left Page) Name: Lucas Sin Class Year: 2015 College: Davenport Hometown: Hong Kong Category: People Title: Children, Tourist Attractions

Pull quote, pull quote, pull quote, pull quote, pull quote, pull quote.

At the Taj Mahal, there’s a tremendous amount of pressure for the overly-conscious traveller to not point his lens at the main attraction.

But in the rush and bustle of India, photo narratives are everywhere.

(Bottom, Left Page) Name: Stephanie Addenbrooke Class year: 2017 College: Jonathan Edwards Hometown: Birkenhead, United Kingdom Category: People Title: Thinking of You It doesn’t matter where we are in the world—there is always something (or more often someone) that draws us back to home. This photograph, taken in a chateau in France, encapsulates that you can be physically grounded in one place and have your mind across oceans, or just even down the street.

Name: Samantha Gardner Class Year: 2017 College: Jonathan Edwards Hometown: Haddonfield, NJ Category: People Title: Charity

One of the most shocking things about India is its poverty.

This was taken after a religious ceremony in Varanasi embellished with speakers, flood lights, and elaborate choreography, seemingly for the benefit of tourists, who watch from boats on the Ganges. I took this photo because I was caught by the old beggar, dressed in priestly attire, who roamed around with his hand open and empty.

Everyone around ignores him, and the man in front, seems to roll his eyes in annoyance.

Name: Semhal Tsegaye Class Year: 2016 College: Timothy Dwight Hometown: Littleton, CO Category: People Title: Defiance On July 24, 2014, following one of the deadliest days of Israel’s most recent war on Gaza, thousands of West Bank Palestinians gathered in a march from Ramallah to Jerusalem to show solidarity with Gaza.

Equipped with rocks, burning tires, and fireworks, demonstrators were met with tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition. For me, this image captures the energy of people who will not let their political and material disadvantages stifle their fight to exist and be sovereign.

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31 fringe Name: Elizabeth Miles Class Year: 2017 College: Jonathan Edwards Hometown: Parkland, Florida Category: People Title: Strangers in the Night I was walking across Jubilee Bridge and was captivated by this man, who had been leaning on the railings for a while. His expression is so ambiguous, while he looks out at the Tower of London, the Eye, and all the other icons—are they part of his home, or just the pages of a guidebook made real? I couldn’t figure it out. But he seemed to be the quiet above the Thames, next to the trains rushing to Embankment station from the roaring nightlife of the South Bank. Amid the countless tourists, for whom London’s bridges are the ultimate photo opportunities, he was still and pensive.

Category: Place

This photo was taken in Chinatown, Kuala Lumpur. This man was taking a quick snooze in between selling his items. He and his colleagues had their shops open nearly all day and all night.

Name: Damian Weikum Class Year: 2015 College: Calhoun Hometown: Old Bridge, NJ Category: Place Title: Power Nap

Name: Lidiya Kukova Class Year: 2017 College: Ezra Stiles Hometown: Stara Zagora, Bulgaria Category: Places Title: Wonder Wheel

My dad and I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro this past summer. and this is a photo I took at one of our camps. Our porters were some of the most amazing people, and this is a picture of them after a long day of hiking in their tent. You can see the summit in the background, which we reached two days later. winter 2015, issue 2

Name: Sierra Conine Class Year: 2018 College: Morse Hometown: Weston, Florida Category: Place

This photograph was taken on July 4th, 2014. It captures one of the workers at Coney Island’s Wonder Wheel just as the ferris wheel’s cars are getting ready to stop and take in a new group of people. www.tyglobalist.org

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Name: Selin Isguven Class Year: 2015 College: Trumbull Hometown: Istanbul, Turkey Category: Home Title: Fisherman’s Shadow

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There are usually many fishermen along the Bosphorus in Istanbul, so it is not a unique sight per se, but I liked the angle of the light and how it cast a shadow on the fisherman. I also liked the clash of the line of the fishing rod with the bridge in the back. To me, it was a perfect expression of the difference between the traffic jam on the bridge—the epitome of busy city life in Istanbul—and the naivety of the act of fishing. Finally, the Bosphorus, the bridge and fishermen are quintessential elements of Istanbul so they made a harmonious composition.

Category: Home A crowd of awestruck travelers eagerly taking pictures of the sunset. I took this photo on August 14th, at Beijing Capital International Airport, minutes before my flight for the U.S. was open for boarding. While waiting for boarding, I heard exclamations of surprise and delight all around me, looked up, and saw that the entire airport was bathed in a golden luminescence. Never could I have expected that after weeks of grey and dreary skies, the smog caused by pollution disappeared on my last day in Beijing to offer the most beautiful sunset I have ever seen.

Yupei Guo Class Year: 2017 College: Branford Hometown: Beijing, China Category: “Home” Title: Sunset in Beijing

Name: Alexis Inguaggiato Class Year: 2017 College: Saybrook Hometown: Alpine, NJ Category: Home Title: Dad I consider my family my home.

My father is a very close and special presence in my life. He is obsessed with hats so when I got the chance to snap a picture of him in his favorite hat shop I loved feeling his pride as he stood in his “home” (the hat store) where he is most content. winter 2015, issue 2

My cousin accidentally dropped the flag into the pool on the Fourth of July and we thought it might be cool if we took some pictures of him swimming around with it. The patriotic nature of our flag not only reminds me of the country I call home, but because I shot this at a family event, I am fondly reminded of everyone back in Los Angeles.

Name: Clara Mokri Class Year: 2018 College: Timothy Dwight Hometown: Los Angeles, California Category: Home Title: Captain Aqua-merica www.tyglobalist.org

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35 fringe ame’s ascension to the presidency, he has worked tirelessly to revolutionize the country and make it a force to be reckoned with. In the past 10 years, Rwanda has moved from having 80 percent of its population under the poverty line to 40 percent; it is considered the 32nd best nation, and the second best in Africa, to conduct

An(other) Inconvenient Truth

Rwanda, Kagame and the moral discomfort of the West

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he day was balmy, 75 degrees and sunny, as we sat sipping coffee in the shade of the über-modern Kigali City Tower.

For a city as densely populated as this one, the streets were extraordinarily quiet, clean. Though I knew Rwanda was peaceful, in spite of its violent history, the level of calm left me just a little uneasy. Coming from London, which had most recently played host to thousands-strong pro-Palestine rallies that would march past my window every weekend, the quiet seemed unnatural. I asked my new Rwandan friend whether he had ever seen any anti-government protests or demonstrations in the capital. He responded with a burst of laughter and shook his head. “They’d be shot in broad daylight in the middle of the street.”

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his year marked the twentieth anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide. Well-known in popular culture thanks to films like “Hotel winter 2015, issue 2

Rwanda” and Philip Gourevitch’s book “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families,” there are few who have not at least heard of the Genocide.

Nonetheless, for those who are not so familiar with it, a quick history lesson may be necessary.

By the start of the Genocide in April 1994, ethnic tensions in Rwanda had been running high for a long time. Colonial-era racial policies had favored the Tutsi, an ethnic minority, over the Hutu, the cultural majority. When the Hutu wrested control from the ruling Tutsi in the first official elections of 1973, violence ensued. For decades, many Tutsis lived in exile in neighboring Uganda, Tanzania, and Burundi. In 1987, a group of these exiles came together to form the Rwandan Patriotic Front, or RPF, which would lead the resistance to the Hutu-led Rwandan government. Back in Rwanda, this government was growing increasingly unstable as advocates of Hutu Power, a movement advocating Hutu

Kagame leads Rwanda with an iron fist -- and an extremely effective one at that. It seems generally accepted amongst Rwandans that what Kagame says goes with few exceptions.

The skyline of Kigali, Rwanda (courtesy Flickr user oledoe).

BY ALLIE KRAUSE

supremacy and extremism in Rwanda, grew in strength and number.

After years of clashes between the RPF and the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR) that deteriorated into a civil war lasting from 1990 to 1993, President Habyarimana of Rwanda and RPF leaders reached a peace agreement at Arusha, Tanzania in August 1993, intended to establish a transitional government comprised of both Hutus and Tutsis. But everything changed on April 6th, 1994 when President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down just outside Kigali. To this day, no one is sure who was the culpable party, whether the RPF or Hutu extremists, but that peace-shattering act, that left both Hutu extremists and RPF without reason to hold back, signaled the start of the bloodiest time in Rwanda’s history and one of the most devastating genocides in world history.

Though the RPF eventually succeeded in pushing out the Hutu Power leaders and mi-

litias, victory was not without a heavy cost.

During that summer in 1994, 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates died at the hands of the FAR and the Interahamwe, the major extremist Hutu Power militia, before the RPF was able to take Kigali.

Fearing retaliation, millions of the majority Hutu ethnic group—including the ousted government, soldiers, and militia—escaped into neighboring Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC), whose President Mobutu had been close with Habyarimana, with others taking flight to Tanzania and Burundi. The refugee camps that formed along the border between Zaire and Rwanda, and their subsequent militarization, paved the way for further conflict and the formation of more militia groups that to this day still run rampant throughout the region.

R

wanda today is a very different place from what it was 20 years ago. Since Paul Kag-

business in; and it has the highest percentage of female participation in governance—currently women hold 64 percent of parliamentary seats and 34 percent of cabinet positions.

This wasn’t achieved by accident. Kagame tolerates neither corruption nor incompetence in his Rwanda. Local leadership is made accountable for the goings on of their districts. As a source close to Kagame, who asked to remain anonymous, explained to me, if money is allocated to fix a road in your district, it better go toward fixing it or you could be ousted before you can say “I promise I’m not corrupt.” Particularly within the Kigali City district, the most populous in the country, this has resulted in incredible infrastructural development. Many in the West have hailed Rwanda as a country worth helping and investing in, from Bill Clinton and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who at the commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the Genocide in 2014 expressed amazement and disbelief at the Rwandan ability to “unite and show that reconciliation is possible even after a monumental tragedy.” Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Tony Blair has been a particularly vocal advocate of Kagame’s Rwanda, and the country has undertaken a variety of pro-investment policy reforms to ensure Rwanda’s continued competitiveness in attracting foreign investment.

Of course, much of this would not be possible if the tensions that have wracked the country for decades were allowed to bubble up to the surface. Kagame leads Rwanda with an iron fist— an extremely effective one at that—and it seems generally accepted amongst Rwandans that, with few exceptions, what Kagame says goes.

Private sector leaders in Rwanda described to me an instance when the government confiscated 30 percent of wealthier landowners’ acreage to redistribute it. What is most shocking is that this was not described with anger, resentment, or even a vague sense of annoyance. As one source explained to me over lunch at a Kigali hotel, “[the government] didn’t use it for themselves, they gave it to those who had nothing.

When they say they’ll do something, they do it.” The people can expect Kagame’s government to follow through on their promises, even if the initial cost to the people is high.

Yet there are those who do take issue with how Kagame has led Rwanda, some who go as far as to revile the government, seeing them as nothing more than Kagame’s cronies, remnants of a colonial hierarchy, and Kagame as nothing more than a repressive dictator disguised by the illusion of democracy. Political opposition to Kagame’s party is virtually nonexistent, and it appears likely that Rwanda will get rid of its constitution’s two-term limit, paving the way for Kagame to run again in 2017.

Much in the way that protests and demonstrations are not tolerated within the country, criticizing Kagame can itself be a dangerous endeavor. Many of those who dare to do so have disappeared or been found dead in mysterious circumstances, most famously Kagame’s former chief of intelligence, Patrick Karegeya. Karegeya had become increasingly critical of his former boss when he was found murdered on January 1st, 2014 in his Johannesburg hotel room.

Though the precise circumstances of his death remain unclear, Kagame did little to distance himself short of officially taking credit for it. At a prayer meeting within the fortnight, he told those gathered: “You can’t betray Rwanda and not get punished for it. Anyone, even those still alive, will reap the consequences. Anyone. It is a matter of time.”

A

much deadlier war of dissent rages in eastern Congo. What began with the post-genocide militarization of refugee camps along the Rwandan border has become a battle between scores of militia groups fighting for control. Local villages, regardless of the ethnicity or political alignment of their inhabitants, live in constant fear of ruthless, brutal attack.

In spite of its best efforts, MONUSCO, the UN’s peacekeeping operation in the DRC, has been unable to slow the tide of ceaseless violence raging in the heart of Africa. These militia groups continue to wreak havoc, threatening the security of the region and committing gross human rights abuses in their efforts to attain greater territorial control. The strongest and best www.tyglobalist.org

37 fringe armed of these, the ones Kagame fears the most, recovered from the terrible violence it endured are the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of for decades, but at what cost? And critically, at Rwanda (FDLR). what point is the West no longer willing to look Established by genocidaires who fled Rwan- past this cost? Is it right to do so? da after the RPF victory, for the most part forWhen the Genocide began, the West, and mer members of the Rwandan Armed Forces the U.S. in particular, was reluctant to intervene and the Interahamwe, their ultimate goal is to following the great failure of intervention in take back what they believe is rightfully theirs. Somalia, just one year before. This resulted in They despise Kagame and want nothing more “one hundred days of silence,” during which the than to overthrow him and his “Tutsi regime.” world watched as ethnic tensions exploded into Though unconfirmed by international sourc- the mass killing, rape, and torture of Rwandan es, the Rwandan government has accused the Tutsis and Hutu moderates. At its end, the West FDLR of conducting a number of attacks on was left with an enormous sense of guilt and a Rwandan soil, including launching bombs and subsequent feeling of duty to aid the RPF-led rockets over the border. government. This support carried on in the face On the other side of the arena is armed rebel of morally problematic events, from a failure to group M23 (named after the March 23, 2009 peace deals between the Congolese government and the National Congress for the Defense of the People, another militia group). Tutsi-led with close ties to Tutsis in neighboring Rwanda, they began their rebellion against the proHutu Congolese government in April 2012, breaking the 2009 peace deals.

International human rights watchdogs have attributed a swathe of human rights abuses to M23, from rape and summary executions to Tea is Rwanda’s second largest export (Krause/TYG). the recruitment of child soldiers. And as M23 grew in strength, whispers of uphold true democracy to the “disappearance” of Kagame supporting the rebels grew too.

300,000 Hutus into the Zairean forest during In recent years, as those whispers became the Great Lakes Refugee Crisis that began folshouts of outrage and more evidence began to lowing the Genocide and finished with forced surface of Rwanda’s likely financial backing of repatriation in 1996. Still, praise flowed in from the rebel group, many of its key Western allies the international community for Rwanda’s great began pulling their foreign aid. The United progress in stability and reconciliation.

Kingdom withdrew $34 million of aid in NoThe moral complicity evident here is most vember 2012, citing concerns over “funding a likely for the sake of political expediency born dictator,” and in October 2013 the United States of American remorse; President Clinton has blocked its military aid over Rwanda’s alleged often talked of the “lifetime responsibility” he support of the M23 rebels. The issue has posed feels over standing by as genocide tore Rwana major problem for Western donors who in the da apart. Yet today Rwanda faces a united West past have been proud in their support for Kag- that has decided that it will not tolerate even ame, praising him for his success in rebuilding a the suggestion that Kagame backed rebel groups war-torn, shattered society into what it is today. in eastern Congo. It is morally intolerable, they The trouble is that in spite of the many ethi- argue. One has to wonder exactly what changed cal problems that have arisen, Kagame has truly between times when the West was willing to succeeded in improving Rwanda in the face of ignore the fact that true democracy had failed great adversity. His administration has pulled in Rwanda, or brush the hundreds of thousands a country out of the rubble and transformed it killed during the refugee crisis under the carinto what is well on its way to becoming a mid- pet, and now, where it has shunned Rwanda dle-income country with a top class healthcare over reports that indicate Kagame might have system to boot. Rwanda has, for the most part, supported rebel groups. At what point does the winter 2015, issue 2

West consider the trade-off between security and democracy too great?

Even if Kagame’s denial of this support to M23 is genuine, does Rwanda not have the right to defend itself ? It has good reason to be worried—the FDLR and many other militia groups operating in eastern Congo seek the utter destruction of Kagame and his administration. The consequences of such instability for the development of the country would be disastrous. The right to self-defense is an argument that has been used to defend the actions of many Western allies in conflict-ridden regions around the world, but it seems that at least in Rwanda, Western appetite for it has abated.

This leads to another conundrum. The West, and particularly the U.S., is adamant in prescribing the Western value system for post-conflict societies like Rwanda. In trying to establish democracies, the West works to boost up leaders that they believe will support Western interests—Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire and Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo in Equatorial Guinea, to name a few—who quickly become uncontrollable. The problem is usually left to fester until some unforeseeable tipping point where some kind of intervention is attempted.

While the West cannot take the full blame for a leader becoming a brutal dictator, a view echoed by several of the academics I spoke to was that the West must learn to understand the limitations of democracy promotion in post-conflict societies.

The situation in Rwanda is nowhere near as extreme as the DRC or Equatorial Guinea, but true democracy, in the Western sense, has failed.

A political system in which the opposition is cowed into silence, in which laws meant to support unity further obfuscate tensions while escalating them, is not a democracy. Yet it cannot be denied that Rwanda’s system of a largely benevolent semi-dictator has been effective; it’s just morally uncomfortable.

Allie Krause ’15 is a Global Affairs major in Timothy Dwight College. Contact her at alexandra.krause@yale.edu.

the Edinburgh

FRINGE

BY MEGAN TOON

Can a festival retain its apolitical nature in a country consumed by bipartisan politics?

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ona Nealgrove watched the tattered campaign banners swaying in the breeze as she waited for the bus on a quiet Scottish residential street. She felt a strange sense of relief when she noticed the spray-painted “YES” on next-door’s letterbox was becoming chipped and unreadable. Only a week ago, the letterbox had featured gaudy posters supporting both sides of the raging debate on Scottish Independence. Now, Rona thankfully felt her memories of that anxious time fading away with the spray-painted letters on the letterbox.

Rona is my cousin and has lived Aberdeen, Scotland her whole life. Over the previous few months, she had watched a once united nation be divided by political ideologies and had listened to disputes between her work colleagues and friends over whether Scotland should cut ties with the United Kingdom. As fierce political disagreements on Scottish independence created a nation divided by irreconcilable ideologies, I became determined to find a Scottish tradition that had not been infiltrated by politics.

Since the independence referendum vote was first approved on November 14, 2013, intense campaign efforts raged over social and traditional media platforms. Efforts finally culminated on September 18, 2014, when the Scottish public voted on whether to end a 301-year social and economic union with the rest of the U.K. A record 84.6 percent of the population turned out for the ballot in contrast to the previous 1979 and 1997 constitutional referendums, which had averaged a turnout of 62 percent.

On the morning of September 18, Rona was at home watching Scotland’s future unfold on the morning news bulletin. As the officials counted the ballots, the mounting uncertainties for Rona’s gathered family reflected the emotions of families across the country. When it was announced that the bill had failed to pass and that Scotland was to remain part of the U.K., grown men across the country dissolved into tears. Scotland had invested its identity in a single vote. Each desolate campaign banner became a memory of thwarted optimism.

On August 1, 2014 however, seven weeks

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before the vote, that optimism was still very much alive. Scotland’s capital was due to host the world’s largest annual performing arts festival, and as theater companies, comedians, playwrights, singers and actors converged upon Edinburgh from around the globe, Scotland’s political parties were actively levying support for the vote on independence. In the weeks leading up to the referendum, citizens throughout the U.K. worried that politicians might monopolize the festival, making performances into a platform for partisan discussion or satirical jabs at their opponents.

What is now known as the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, or more succinctly the “Fringe,” originated in 1947 when eight theatre companies showed up uninvited to the Inauguaral Edinburgh Festival. The twenty-five-day-long eclectic display of the Fringe has since expanded to include acts from forty-seven countries and to stage over 2700 performances across 279 Edinburgh venues. According to Three Weeks magazine, the Fringe prides itself on the philosophy that “any performer or Theatre Company who can raise the money and find a performance space is welcome.” The festival does not have a director, a board or a lone company to impose limits on performances. Instead, performers have the liberty to incorporate any content they deem applicable to their act.

Several Scottish acts or performers at the festival did choose to address the political tensions in their performances; Vladimir McTavish and Keir McAllister provided poignant left- wing perspectives in their comedy, Aye right? How no?: The Comedy Countdown to the Referendum. Cast members in the Scottish Youth Theatre were voting for the first time in the referendum, and they used their production of Now’s the Hour to voice personal aspirations or concerns about the upcoming vote. Even the traditionally somber analysts from BBC’s Newsnight tried their hand at light entertainment and provided audiences with a taste of Scottish self-determination. Audiences, however, appreciated the performances for their entertainment value and overlooked the tensions that such dialogues

fringe 38 would have exposed in a political arena. Overall the festival steered clear of political invectives.

One performer, who wished to remain anonymous due to contract endorsements, felt liberated by the lack of political pressures existing at the festival. “It was if a bubble had been formed to isolate the festival from the turmoil of everyday social and political burdens,” she said.

In keeping a stringent distance from the disputes in Westminster, the Fringe showcased the talent of the world’s finest performing artists unimpeded by ideological divides. On this occasion, politics did not “infringe” on the Fringe.

The festival demonstrated the opportunity that the artistic community offers to withdraw from the encumbrances of everyday life. The international audience may have returned home bemused by the occasional political quibble, but the majority of performances adhered to the festival’s communal philosophy.

In time, Scottish nationalists will clear away frayed “YES” banners and rebuild a campaign to advocate independence. For 48 out of 52 weeks in the year, politics will continue to divide the Scottish people, but for a fleeting interval each summer, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival will show how art can unite a world. The performer in the festival described her experiences in Edinburgh as akin to “pan-fringism.”

“The festival has the same ideals as nationalism—to unite people who share the same beliefs—but it leaves behind the tensions and uncertainties nationalists conjure when their ideals conflict with the rest of the world.”

Megan Toon ‘16 is a Classics major in Trumbull College. Contact her at megan.toon@yale.edu.

www.tyglobalist.org

UN REST

photo essay 40

IN

THE

WEST BANK

BY SEMHAL TSEGAYE

Qalandiya , July 24: (left) A demonstrator raises the Palestinian

I

nthe summer of 2014, the outbreak of violence between Israel and Hamas drew the eyes of the world. While the international lens was focused on the fighting in Gaza, the West Bank also saw unrest as Palestinians came out in massive numbers to show solidarity with the residents of Gaza. Palestinians in the West Bank are not subject to the magnitude of violence seen in Gaza, but still harbor deep grievances at the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements and continued territorial occupation. This summer, these grievances were compounded by the Israeli offensive into Gaza and the mounting civilian death toll. Mounting pressure and frustration in the West Bank erupted as Palestinians took to the streets in protest.

These photos document three different demonstrations across the West Bank during the course of the offensive. The first was in Ramallah, the capital of the West Bank. It took place on Sunday, July 20, as Palestinians expressed their outrage at the growing numbers of civilian

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flag as the crowd attempts to approach the Qalandia checkpoint outside of Jerusalem.

The air is dense with debris and smoke as fireworks are shot from the Palestinian side and Israeli soldiers shoot tear gas, rubber bullets, and eventually live ammunition. casualties. July 20 was the deadliest day in Gaza with 122 Palestinian deaths and 16 Israeli deaths.

It also marks Laylat al-Qadr, the most important day in Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting.

The second demonstration was a march from Ramallah to the Qalandia checkpoint, which separates the West Bank from Jerusalem. The crowd swelled as thousands of Palestinians gathered for the largest protest the ing to parts of East Jerusalem. In the ensuing chaos, two Palestinians were killed, about 200 wounded, and several Israeli officers in Jerusalem were struck by stone-throwers.

The third protest takes place every Friday in Bilin, a village made famous by the documentary Five Broken Cameras. Each week for the past ten years villagers, activists from across Palestine, and international activists have gathered to protest the Israeli separation barrier encroaching into Palestinian territory. These protests have been successful in the past; Israel altered the location of the barrier in 2011 in light

of the international attention drawn to the issue.

An underlying feature of each demonstration was how violence was interwoven with moments of stillness. Friends stood under a store awning and shared a cigarette. Women sat together on tires, tutting and shaking their heads as if discussing their children’s transgressions.

As bullets struck the billboard overhead, a hunched over man wove through the crowd, offering onion quarters to offset the effects of the tear gas. Such patterns of behavior have become routine in the context of resistance. After loading a man into an ambulance, one demonstrator leaned his head against his friend’s back, slowly closing his eyes in a brief lull before wrapping his keffiyeh once more and re-entering the crowd.

Semhal Tsegaye ‘16 is a Political Science major in Timothy Dwight College. Contact her at semhal.tsegaye@yale.edu.

Ramallah, July 20: (top right) A girl looks on as candles are laid out in the center of Ramallah, capital of the West Bank, to spell “Gaza” in Arabic. As of this day, thirteen days into the conflict, over 100 children had been killed in Gaza.

(middle) Protesters attempt to roll a burning tire during clashes with Israeli forces. The demonstration was held to show solidarity with Gazans following the deadliest day of the war.

(bottom) Masked demonstrators stoke a burning tire while waving the Palestinian flag. It is common for demonstrators to shield their faces both as protection from tear gas and to keep from being identified by Israeli forces, which could lead to reprisals.

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photo essay 42 Bilin, July 31: A vocal protester insists that he is doing no harm. He takes a seat with the Palestinian flag.

A resident of Bilin emphasizes to Israeli soldiers that this will be a peaceful protest, picking up and dropping stones to highlight that they will not be used.

Ramallah , July 24: One of the many ambulances that ferried back and forth through the demonstration. Due to dense crowds, tear gas, and gunfire, mobility for the ambulances was extremely difficult at the West Bank.

Only one ambulance made it to the front of the march at the Qalandia checkpoint, close to Israeli forces.

In the process of picking up injured demonstrators, the driver and paramedic were hit by rubber bullets.

A demonstrator injured in confrontations with Israeli soldiers during the march from Ramallah to Qalandia is carried into the back of an ambulance. Ten of the 200 wounded protesters were critically injured.

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Demonstrators disperse as cans of tear gas are fired into the crowd.

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fringe 44

43 fringe

A Poisonous Legacy Addressing the health and environmental consequences of Agent Orange, decades after the Vietnam War

BY ZOE RUBIN

Courtesy Flickr user felixtriller.de.

T

his year, The New York Times’ annual “52 Places to Go” feature spotlighted Da Nang, Vietnam. Once a “coastal gateway,” the paper argued, the central Vietnamese city had become a “destination in its own right.” A recent airport expansion, the Times noted, had spurred luxury resort developments. Now contemporary travelers could take advantage of Dragon Air’s new direct flight from Hong Kong to try Da Nang’s bahn mi sandwiches and delight in its long sandy beaches.

But those who fly into Da Nang International Airport may be struck by a very different kind of vista. Next to the runway stands a vast edifice of corrugated steel streaked with rust, about eight meters in height and a hundred meters in length. This temporary building, known as a “containment structure,” encloses more than 73,000 cubic meters of soil contaminated by Agent Orange, a herbicide and defoliant laden with the carcinogen dioxin. During the Vietnam War, the United States military conducted a mass aerial spraying campaign in the effort to root out the Viet Cong, destroying more than 5 million acres of forests and crops. In the prowinter 2015, issue 2

cess, an estimated 4.5 million Vietnamese and hundreds of thousands of American soldiers were exposed to the toxin.

“The operation was the longest and largest [of its kind] in the world, not just in Vietnam,” said Dr. Le Ke Son, who directed the government’s programs related to Agent Orange at the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment (MONRE). “We’re talking about more than 80 million liters of herbicides sprayed throughout the south of Vietnam.”

Da Nang’s airport was then a critical U.S. military base, where massive drums of the chemical were stored, their orange stripes giving “Agent Orange” its eponymous name. But over time, the toxic defoliant seeped into the surrounding land, creating what officials call a “dioxin hotspot.” There are twenty-eight such hotspots throughout the country.

Efforts are now under way to gather all of Da Nang’s contaminated soil and sediment in the containment structure and denature it with extreme heat, so that future generations will not be exposed to the toxin. U.S. public statements have heralded the remediation project as a symbol of the extraordinary evolution of U.S.-Viet-

nam bilateral relationship in recent months.

“We’re moving beyond those legacy war issues and toward a new relationship,” Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared when he visited Da Nang last August.

But progress to address the extent of environmental and health-related consequences of the aerial spraying campaign remains mixed, and scant political will in the U.S. exists for the financial and symbolic steps many deem necessary. In the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, the Nixon administration promised to provide $ 3 billion to address war legacy issues and to provide for the post-war reconstruction of Vietnam.

As 1973 moves further and further into the historical past, is time running out for those whose lives have been poisoned by Agent Orange and its consequences?

Top-left and bottom-right: The Hoa Binh Peace Village at Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City is home to about 60 children with physical and mental diabilities. Most likely suffer from the effects of Agent Orange exposure (Rubin/TYG). Top-right and bottom-left: The exhibit at Ho Chi Minh City’s War Remanents stresses the continuing health and environmental consequences of the U.S.’s wartime defoliation campaign (courtesy Flickr user Christian Haugen).

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he War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City takes an unabashedly heavy-handed approach to condemning the U.S.’s actions in Vietnam. Originally named the American War Crimes Museum, the site hews to the North Vietnamese line, depicting the Viet www.tyglobalist.org

fringe ##

45 fringe But a decade ago, American and Vietnam- the Aspen Institute’s Agent Orange in Vietnam Cong as a stoic band of freedom fighters pursued by a barbaric enemy who preyed upon the ese interlocutors concluded that their formal Program, in his annual report that year. But civilian population at large. The exhibit devoted dialogue on the subject of Agent Orange was many now fear that addressing other Agent Orto Agent Orange is particularly unnerving. An getting almost nowhere. Whereas diplomatic ange legacy issues may pose a far more thorny entire wall shows pictures of disabled Vietnam- progress had been made on issues pertaining to challenge. ese whose parents or grandparents were pre- Americans and Vietnamese missing in action, ive hundred miles south of Da Nang lies sumably exposed to Agent Orange. The camera military relations, regional security, and humanthe city of Bien Hoa, located on the outzooms in on their severe physical deformities— itarian affairs, Agent Orange remained a perpetbandied legs, dwarfish statures, enlarged heads, ual sticking point. Thus, in 2007 the Ford Foun- skirts of Saigon. Bien Hoa, Thong repeatedly and missing limbs. One caption notes the man dation spearheaded the establishment of the stressed, is “far more seriously affected by the depicted above possesses the intelligence of a U.S.-Vietnam Dialogue Group on Agent Or- use of Agent Orange than Da Nang.” Accordyoung child; another describes how the parents ange/Dioxin in the hope that prominent private ing to the Aspen Institute, upwards of 230,000 of the boy pictured must keep him permanently civilians, scientists, and government officials cubic meters of soil and pond sediments may in a cage to prevent him from chewing on him- on both sides, such as Son, Thong, and Walter still be contaminated with dioxin in and around self. On an adjacent wall, a display contains jars Isaacson, might be able to find common ground. the former U.S. airbase. Thong hopes that the of still-born fetuses submerged in U.S. and Vietnam may be able formaldehyde. The accompanying to launch another joint effort to black banner reads, “Agent Orclean up Bien Hoa akin to the ange, Dioxin Kills.” project already underway in Da Such accusatory discourse is Nang. Yet, Son remains skeptical emblematic of the longstanding about the U.S.’s political capacity differences between Vietnam and to amass such funding for foreign the U.S. over how to address the aid. “The U.S. has also been very consequences, both direct and inimportant,” he conceded, “but direct, of Agent Orange. Though your government does not have the two countries normalized enough power.” relations in 1995 the subject reThe public health risk in Bien mained fraught with tensions, Hoa is too dire to allow for further and diplomatic talks did not start time to be spent conducting imuntil about four years later. “This pact studies and funding assessis so sensitive an issue that both ments at the expense of beginning sides could not even agree on the the actual remediation project. venue of the first dialogue,” said After the American withdrawal, Ambassador Ha Huy Thong, the Bien Hoa became an airbase for vice chair of the Vietnamese Nathe Vietnam People’s Air Forces., tional Assembly’s Foreign Affairs and until recently, no one knew Committee. As growing scientific General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the extent to which workers on evidence pointed to a strong cor- visits USAID’s Agent Orange/Dioxin remediation site at Da Nang the airbase and nearby residents relation between dioxin and cancer, airport (courtesy Flickr user Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ). continued to risk exposure to dioxbirth defects, and other disabilities, in contamination each day. When U.S. officials remained on the defensive, ques- According to Thong, the informal channel (now the United Nations Development Program tioning the veracity of Vietnamese claims. “The led by the Aspen Institute) aims to be a space (UNDP) and the Global Environment FacilU.S. always asserted that this was not a poison, where both sides can bring up concerns long ity commissioned an environmental survey of only a chemical,” recalled Nguyen The Luc, deemed too sensitivity for the tenuous bilateral the Bien Hoa site in 2013, they found dioxin one of the vice-presidents of the Vietnamese talks and raise public awareness about their mu- concentrations eight times higher than the recAssociation of Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin tual need to address the problem. Son stressed ommended level in 16 of the 28 lakes surveyed.

(VAVA). the dialogue group’s emphasis on transparency By seeping into the local water supply, dioxin During the early 2000s, Nguyen’s advocacy and mutual trust. “All information has been set affects the local food supply. Each time local group unsuccessfully challenged Dow Chemical on the table,” he said, unlike in previous talks. families sit down to an afternoon che or pho they Co., one of the manufacturers of Agent Orange, “I’ll tell the U.S. side and our international part- risk ingesting the carcinogen toxin. Contaminain a U.S. district court, claiming that the use of ners, some [information] is good—it’s scientific. tion on this scale cannot be addressed through the defoliant amounted to a war crime. Their And some is not so good—it’s not so scientific.” private sector-led efforts; only governments can case and subsequent appeals were denied unDue in large part to the efforts of the provide the financial backing necessary to ender the “government contractor defense,” which U.S-Vietnam Dialogue Group, the two coun- sure further progress. absolved Dow of any liability due to its govern- tries launched the Da Nang environmental rement contractor status. Whereas a similar court mediation project in August of 2012. “The U.S. Zoe Rubin ’16 is a History major in Timothy case filed by American veterans in 1979 led to an Administration has now formally committed itDwight College. Contact her at zoe.rubin@ out-of-court settlement of approximately $180 self to whatever it takes to clean up the dioxin at yale.edu. million, VAVA received no such arrangement.

Da Nang,” said Dr. Charles Bailey, who heads

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winter 2015, issue 2

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