Minority Report

In their first year in power, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives managed to undo years of work that came before—rejecting the Kelowna Accord, scrapping the national daycare program and turning their backs on Kyoto. Lest we forget, here are eight reasons to turf the Tories the next chance we get.

By Mitch Moxley
From "This" Magazine

“The West is in,” trumpeted the Calgary Herald after Election Day 2006, when Canadians gave the Harper Conservatives a trial run in government, a slim minority to punish the scandal-plagued Liberals. It was heralded as a new era in Canadian politics. Harper was able to take a party born of western alienation and broaden its appeal to a national audience. The Conservatives ran a disciplined campaign, pitching Canadians a party that was centrist and moderate, led by a man who had softened and evolved. Many Canadians bought it.

Call it a bout of temporary insanity. Over the past year, the puzzle has come together, piece by piece, revealing a party far to the right of the Canadian mainstream. The Conservatives have attacked social programs, enraged supporters of same-sex marriage, abandoned Kyoto, and more. It hasn’t gone unnoticed: polls show chances of a Conservative majority growing slimmer by the day. That’s good news, because a Harper majority is a frightening prospect. “On almost every front you look at, Harper has proceeded with a right-wing agenda,” says Toronto Star columnist and author Linda McQuaig. “And that is with a minority. With a majority government, it would be this on steroids.”

1. THEIR ROOTS ARE SHOWING

Meet Stephen Harper: Canadian neo-con, policy wonk extraordinaire and the most right-wing prime minister this country has seen. A brief history lesson: Harper entered politics in 1984, in his mid-20s, as an aide to Tory MP Jim Hawkes. Before long, young Harper grew disillusioned with the Mulroney Conservatives. He quit in 1987, but was soon recruited as chief policy officer to Preston Manning, founder of the Reform party, a grassroots populist movement out of Alberta that arose from frustration with Brian Mulroney’s attempts to give Quebec “distinct society” status. Taking its cues from Manning’s father’s Social Credit party, Reform’s main goal was to drastically limit the role of government in public life. Harper ran for the House of Commons with Reform in 1988, losing badly to his old mentor, Hawkes, before winning the seat in 1993. He soon grew tired of party politics, frustrated he wasn’t able to freely speak his mind. He resigned his seat in 1997 to lead the National Citizens Coalition, a far-right, anti-government lobby group. In 2002, he returned to the political arena to lead the Canadian Alliance, the party formed by the 2000 merger between Reform and some Progressive Conservatives. Leading up to his election as prime minister, and during his first months in power, Harper was able to successfully present himself as moderate and appeal to middleclass voters. It’s instructive, however, to take a look at Harper’s ideological roots, from which he has never strayed too far.

Harper is a product of the so-called Calgary School, a clique of academics from the University of Calgary. Members include historian David Bercuson, and political scientists Barry Cooper, Rainer Knopff, Ted Morton (also a politician) and one of Harper’s closest advisors, Tom Flanagan—all of whom share an affinity for free markets and small government.

The group’s most famous figure is Flanagan, an American-born professor who was Harper’s national campaign director in the 2004 election. After studying at Notre Dame and Duke, Flanagan accepted a post at the fledgling U of C in 1968, and in the early 1990s became involved with Manning’s Reform movement. No stranger to controversy, he set tempers ablaze with his book First Nations? Second Thoughts, in which he dismissed Canada’s Aboriginals as merely “first immigrants” and argued for their assimilation. Another Flanagan work, an introductory political science textbook he co-authored, was removed from Ontario’s list of approved textbooks because of alleged biases against Jews and women.

The Calgary School has striking similarities to the American neo-conservatives who have the ear of George W. Bush (think World Bank president and Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz). Both the Calgary School and U.S. neo-cons have been heavily influenced by Leo Strauss, a one-time political scientist at the University of Chicago who is considered a founding father of the neo-conservative movement. Strauss, who died in 1973 and has gained a weighty posthumous reputation, was deeply suspicious of democracy, arguing that the public is not capable of making intelligent political decisions. Neo-cons, both American and Canadian, use democracy to turn citizens against their own liberties, says Shadia Drury, a Strauss expert and political philosophy professor at the University of Regina. Drury, who worked alongside the Calgary School until 2003, warns that Canadian neo-cons want to remake Canada in the image of the United States. “Their values are not Canadian values,” Drury says of Harper and his pedagogical influences. “Fortunately, Canadian values are still too much on the side of freedom.”

2. WE DON’T CALL THEM “PROGRESSIVE” ANYMORE FOR A REASON

May 31, 2003: In a room at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Toronto, next door to the Tory convention, Progressive Conservative leadership candidate Peter MacKay scribbles a pledge to rival David Orchard on a piece of paper. MacKay’s promise to Orchard, a PC veteran who held the second-most delegates, was that if chosen as leader he would not merge the party with the Stephen Harper-led Canadian Alliance. In return, Orchard promises the support of his delegates, ensuring a MacKay victory. Unfortunately for Orchard, in less than six months, MacKay shakes hands with Harper, and the Conservative party of Canada is born. “It was a remarkable takeover and theft of the Progressive Conservative party,” says Orchard, who went on to fight the merger in court. “Here we have a very narrow, ideologically driven [party] that’s connected to the U.S. religious right on a whole number of different issues. There’s an ideologically driven narrow-mindedness that was not part of the Progressive Conservative party at all.”

It was a defining moment in Canadian politics, and one often forgotten. The formation of the Conservative party of Canada marked the end of a moderate tradition of conservatism in Canada and replaced it with a U.S.-style version. Today’s Conservative party is very much a product of the ones that preceded it—Reform and Canadian Alliance. Some of the more inflammatory voices have been softened, but many policies and faces remain the same. Think of Harper’s obsession with building a new relationship with the provinces, and stripping the federal government of its responsibility for social services, or the party’s social conservative agenda and connection to the religious right. “The Conservative party, historically, always had a full spectrum of centre to far right. It was just that the centre was always fully in charge,” says Allan Gregg, chair of the Strategic Counsel, a national market- and publicopinion research company, and former PC pollster. “Now you have a guy in charge who comes from the more orthodox right wing of the party. This is a guy who leads that party with an iron fist. His way is the dominant way within the Conservative party.”

The Red Tory element of the PC party has all but disappeared. It may be called the Conservative party, but progressive it is not. “The media do them an enormous favour every time they call them ‘Tories,’ ” says Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada. “They are not the Tory party.”

3. THEY’RE PLAYING DRESS-UP

Remember Harper’s summer 2005 makeover campaign? Sometime between the 2004 and 2005 elections, the Tories tried to transform Harper from a scary social conservative accused of harbouring a hidden agenda to a likeable dad and political moderate with broad vision and admirable determination. Suddenly images of Stephen Harper participating in events usually reserved for ordinary people appeared in print and on television across the country. Remember Stephen Harper clumsily throwing a football? Or Harper fingerpainting with children? How about the cross-country BBQ tour, when they dressed him up in cowboy hat and vest and sent him out flipping burgers? Happy times.

Harper’s makeover campaign largely failed. Attempts to make him look likeable were awkward and often ridiculed. During the fingerpainting photo-op with kindergarteners, for example, the old Stephen Harper—stiff and bitter—shone through. A youngster with gooey fingers approached the Opposition leader, eliciting the response, “Don’t touch me.”

Where the Tories did succeed, however, was in controlling the debate. In the 2004 election, the Liberals were able to run a campaign that successfully vilified Harper. In the last campaign, however, Harper turned the table, attacking Liberal corruption while staying strictly on message. This focus on controlling the message is a page out of the U.S. Republican playbook. In fact, the party had Republican help. In May, a group of Canada’s foremost conservatives gathered in Kanata, Ontario, to receive some words of wisdom from Frank Luntz, a GOP pollster and the brains behind the Republicans’ sweep of Congress in 1994. Luntz spoke to 200 members of the Civitas Society, a conservative group whose members include Harper’s chief of staff, Ian Brodie, as well as Tom Flanagan, a founding member.

Luntz, who has previously done work for Preston Manning, is a master of tailoring a conservative message and selling it to moderate voters. His strategy is called “language guidance”—the use of simple messages, which are carefully tested and often repeated. He advocates the use of key words, images, pictures and national symbols to deflect suspicion of unpopular policies. Instead of “tax cuts,” use “tax relief.” Tax code simplification as opposed to tax code reform. Don’t privatize a program, personalize it. And so on. Canadian Conservatives have made Luntz’s strategy their own. Think of the Tories’ “five priorities,” the oft-repeated insults about Paul Martin, and the “made in Canada” solution to global warming.

By staying on message and focusing the attack on the Liberals, Harper was able to deflect attention from his past. And what a past it has been. The Harper of the last election seemed to be an entirely different person than he’s been in the past 20 years—the one who has railed against universal health care, social programs and a strong federal government. No matter what he told us in the last election, Stephen Harper is no national leader.

4. THEIR CITIZENS AREN’T CREATED EQUAL

Considering the Harper Conservatives’ roots, the way they have governed should hardly come as a surprise. Once in office things went smoothly; Harper and his cabinet focused exclusively on its five priorities: the GST cut, daycare credit, health-care wait times, government accountability and crime. But since getting elected, the government has revealed the depths of its true colours, governing like a farright party, beginning with an attack on equality.

First, there was the cancellation of the Kelowna Accord, an agreement negotiated under the previous Liberal government to help bridge the gap between Aboriginals and other Canadians by earmarking $5 billion to improve education, housing, economic development, health and water services on reserves. Then, the government voted to reject the draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples at the UN Human Rights Council. According to Angus Toulouse, Ontario regional chief for the Assembly of First Nations, the Harper Conservatives have sent a message to Canada’s Aboriginal people that they do not care. “It clearly told us this government is going to step on the poorest of the poor, which is the Aboriginal people in Canada,” Toulouse says.

Native people are not the only target of the Harper government’s attack on equality. In September, the government lopped 40 percent off the budget of Status of Women Canada, an agency that promotes gender equality. And same-sex marriage advocates have long been a favourite target of the Conservative party. Harper himself voted against extending hate propaganda legislation to include homosexuality, and in the last election campaign said a Conservative government would hold a free vote on same-sex marriage.

Conservative opposition to same-sex marriage makes sense given the party’s religious base. The evangelical set considers Harper, a self-confessed born-again Christian, to be one of their own. “I want to make it clear that Christians are welcome in politics,” Harper said on the Drew Marshall Show leading up to last year’s election. “And particularly welcome in our party.” Some MPs come straight from the religious right. Stockwell Day once famously declared that Adam and Eve roamed with dinosaurs. David Sweet, MP for Ancaster-Dundas-Flamborough-Westdale, is past head of the Christian group Promise Keepers Canada, which helps “men grow and mature into Godly men,” according to the group’s website. And Harold Albrecht, MP for Kitchener-Conestoga, once wrote a letter to the editor of his local newspaper saying, “These same-sex marriages would succeed in wiping out an entire society in just one generation.” Then there was the news that Justice Minister Vic Toews wants to table a Defence of Religions Act, legislation that would protect critics of homosexuality and same-sex marriage, and ensure the right of officials to refuse to perform gay marriages. Many of the Canadian right’s fiercest opponents of same-sex marriage remain influential within the Conservative party. For example, Harper recently named Darrel Reid chief of staff to Environment Minister Rona Ambrose. Reid is the former president of Focus on the Family Canada, the Canadian branch of the U.S.-based anti-gay-marriage group. Reid has made a career out of fighting against equality for same-sex couples, and once said that the decision to legalize gay marriage made him “ashamed to be called a Canadian.”

“We have to connect the dots,” says Gilles Marchildon, executive director of Egale Canada, an advocacy group for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transidentified people. “This is not a government that supports equality and justice.”

5. OPACITY IS THE NEW TRANSPARENCY

Among the Conservatives’ original five priorities was an accountability law to make government more transparent—a move Canadians welcomed in the wake of the sponsorship scandal. They tabled the Federal Accountability Act in April, which banned corporate and union donations to federal parties, cracked down on lobbyists, protected whistle-blowers and gave more power to officers of Parliament, such as the ethics commissioner and auditor general.

But Harper’s own administration has been anything but transparent. After taking office, the prime minister wasted little time declaring war on the media. He insisted members of the press gallery sign a list if they wanted to ask questions, he rarely participates in scrums and he often leaves the Parliament Buildings through the freight exit instead of the front door to avoid media attention. “Unfortunately, the press gallery has taken the view they are going to be the opposition to the government,” Harper complained to a London, Ontario, TV station, the same week two dozen reporters walked out of a Harper event after he refused to take their questions.

According to a national press gallery reporter, who spoke anonymously, interview requests with ministers are frequently denied or simply unaddressed. Reporters are also banned from the floor on which ministers hold meetings, and ministers rarely scrum after cabinet meetings, a common practice under the Liberals. “Everybody’s hands are tied from a journalistic point of view. It’s extremely difficult to get answers from this government,” the reporter says. “It’s Harper’s mandate to treat us like this and it’s not going to change. It’s very disheartening.”

Harper has also gone to great lengths to silence his ministers. What happens behind closed doors stays there, and the PMO insists ministers stay on message. An April 2006 scheduled interview between the National Post’s Don Martin and Environment Minister Rona Ambrose, for example, was cancelled because the PM didn’t want his ministers to stray from the Conservatives’ five priorities. In mid-October, Ontario MP Garth Turner was expelled for regularly criticizing his party’s policies on his blog, and Conservative Senator Anne Cools was yanked from three committees in September for asking hostile questions about the Accountability Act, according to a Post article by Martin.

6. IMITATION IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY

Stephen “Steve” Harper, Bush’s favourite Canadian, has been busy cozying up to the Americans since taking office last year. Hardly a surprise, since Harper has been advocating for closer ties to the United States for years. He has beefed up Canada’s mission in Afghanistan, committing troops for an additional two years, and has promised a $5.3-billion increase in military spending over the next five years. “Ideologically, the people who are driving the Conservative party—Harper and his entourage—are very much attuned to and aligned with the Bush Republican-style conservatism,” says Bruce Campbell, executive director of Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) in Ottawa.

Harper’s been ending his speeches with “God bless Canada” since last year’s campaign, but his emulation of the United States is more than just symbolic. Paul Martin’s Liberals laid the foundation for deep integration—the harmonization of U.S. and Canadian trade and border policies—and the Harper government has carried this agenda forward. The Canadian Council of Chief Executives, which lobbies government on behalf of big business, is spearheading the movement, arguing that the economies of the two countries are already so closely linked that most individual domestic laws aren’t needed. It may sound like a conspiracy theory, but for several years, task forces, working groups, commissions and cross-border consultations have been taking place on both sides of the border with the goal of harmonizing Canada-U.S. programs and procedures. In September, for example, Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor and Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day attended a top-secret meeting in Banff, Alberta, that discussed North American security and prosperity. The North American Forum was hosted with the help of the Canada West Foundation and the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and drew corporate executives and government officials from Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. Reporters were kept in the dark about what, exactly, was discussed and who was in attendance.

Supporters of deep integration say it’s the only way Canada can stay competitive. Critics call it a threat to Canadian sovereignty that will lead to lopsided trade agreements and a loss of control of Canadian resources. Campbell notes that we are already feeling the impact of deep integration. Canada and the U.S. are at work integrating energy markets, and Canada is ramping up production of the Alberta oil patch to meet America’s growing energy needs. The bulk of Alberta oil goes to the United States, Campbell says, while the Maritimes and Quebec import about 90 percent of their oil needs and Ontario imports 50 percent. “It’s all about securing supply to meet U.S. energy needs,” he warns. “Here we are, this great energy superpower, as Stephen Harper likes to call us, and we’re importing 55 percent of our oil needs. That’s not an integrated national energy market.”

Canada has also followed America’s lead on the domestic front. In the area of crime and punishment, Canada has made a marked shift toward an American style of justice, with “serious time for serious crimes.” In October, Justice Minister Vic Toews unveiled his “three strikes and you’re out” legislation, which is based on similar U.S. legislation. The bill puts the onus on the defendant, proposing that anyone convicted of three violent or sexual crimes would have to convince a judge why he should not be classified as a dangerous offender. If he fails to do that, he faces a minimum seven years in prison before being eligible for parole (in contrast to the American law, Canada’s three-strikes legislation focuses on serious third offences only). The U.S. legislation has done little to deter crime south of the border and has cost an enormous amount of money. “A large amount of research in the U.S. has been overwhelmingly consistent in showing that these changes have no effect,” Tony Doob, a criminology professor at the University of Toronto, told The Globe and Mail last October. “Whether you bring in threestrike laws, or jump up and down and say ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ three times, it has the same effect…. The fact is that crime will sometimes go down. It has nothing to do with legislative changes.”

7. WELFARE STATE?

Last September’s $1-billion “trimming the fat” exercise was a subtle but definitive attack on social programs. The Youth Employment Strategy, which helped 50,000 young people find jobs last summer, was cut in half. The Conservatives also chopped $17.7 million off adult literacy programs, ended a $9.7 million program to encourage Canadians to volunteer and did away with the $5.6-million Court Challenges Program, which has funded legal action by human rights advocates.

The cuts don’t mark the end of the Canadian welfare state, but they do show a sign of what may be to come—major cuts, despite a major surplus ($13.2 billion in 2006). McQuaig points to the Conservatives’ withdrawal of $5 billion in child-care spending by the Liberals. “It had taken advocacy groups, women’s groups, decades to finally pressure and pin down government to set up that program,” McQuaig says. “The Tories just scrapped it as soon as they got into office. It’s absolutely, totally irresponsible.”

8. WITHER KYOTO

The Conservative record on the environment has been nothing short of catastrophic. Consider: The axed $1-billion Climate Fund has so far only been replaced by an incentive-based transit tax credit, which saves the average transit user a paltry $12 a month. The EnerGuide program, which helped people retrofit their homes to make them more energy efficient, has been eliminated. The list goes on. The Conservatives have also forced layoffs at Natural Resources Canada and cut the Canadian Climate Impacts and Adaptation Research Network. Their biggest crime, of course, has been to abandon Canada’s Kyoto Protocol targets. They’ve opted instead for the Clean Air Act, an initiative with the laughable target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. (Meanwhile, the federal government continues to send $1.5 billion a year in subsidies to the Alberta oil patch.)

Perhaps most alarming is the Conservatives’ ho-hum attitude toward the climate crisis. Many environmental experts interviewed for this article say Harper and his advisors may not even believe in climate change, despite overwhelming evidence and the endorsements of a plethora of leading scientific organizations. For example, the scientific consensus on climate change is clearly expressed in reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme to evaluate the state of climate science as a basis for policy decisions. The panel concluded that the scientific consensus is that the Earth’s climate is being affected by human activities. Another recent study, conducted by researchers at NASA, Columbia University and the University of California at Santa Barbara, found the world is the warmest it’s been in 12,000 years—and humans are largely to blame.

But the Conservatives aren’t buying it. In November, the government appointed University of Western Ontario physics professor Christopher Essex, a climate change skeptic and Kyoto critic, to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, which controls $900 million a year in funding. Essex was one of 20 Canadian academics who signed an open letter to the prime minister in April that urged the government to scrap Kyoto, calling it an “irrational” squandering of billions of dollars. “There will always be people who say climate change isn’t happening,” says Dale Marshall, climate-change policy analyst with the David Suzuki Foundation. “But the question is, what is the body of evidence telling us? Overwhelmingly the science is saying climate change is happening. There’s no real dispute in the scientific community.”

“There is greater reason to feel comfortable with Mr. Harper today,” a Globe and Mail editorial declared last January. “He has shown himself to be an intelligent man and one, in this last campaign at least, who has learned to master his emotions. He has gained control of a party inclined to fly off in all directions, moved it to the centre and proposed a reasonable if imperfect governing platform.”

Forgive us if we’re skeptical. “This is a guy who will never change,” says Murray Dobbin, Vancouver-based journalist and author of Paul Martin: CEO for Canada? “The notion that Stephen Harper would change his fundamental values is just delusional. He is still viscerally contemptuous of his own country, and I think that puts him in a unique position of any prime minister in the history of the country. I can’t think of any other prime minister who actually hated his own country.” After all, Stephen Harper is the same man who, only a decade before, was head of the National Citizens Coalition, perhaps the most virulently right-wing organization in Canada, a group that was founded to oppose publicly funded, universal health care. He’s the same man who has advocated a firewall around Alberta to protect itself from a hostile federal government. The same man who has mocked Canadians’ understanding of their own country and who has called America’s conservative movement an inspiration. This is the same man who has made a career out of consistently and ardently criticizing Canada and its values. “Canada is a northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it,” Harper told the Council for National Policy, a right-leaning American think tank, at a June 1997 meeting in Montreal.

There is reason for optimism, however. Canadians’ dissatisfaction with the Conservative government is showing in recent polls. In a November CBC News and Environics Research Group poll, 29 percent of respondents said they would vote for the Conservatives if an election were held today, compared to 28 percent who would vote for the Liberal party—which did not have a leader at the time. Perhaps more tellingly, respondents said health care, the environment and the war in Afghanistan were the most important issues facing the country, while conservative pet topics— same-sex marriage, Canada-U.S. relations and government corruption—ranked near the bottom. That does not bode well for Conservatives. “Unless the Liberals are extremely incompetent after they choose their leader,” Dobbin says, “this will be the end of Harper.”

Here’s hoping.

Mitch Moxley is a freelance journalist based in Toronto, by way of Saskatchewan. His work has appeared in Maisonneuve, Toro, Geist, the Kyoto Journal and elsewhere.


A Home Away from Home

By Gregory Scarborough
From Cultural Survival Quarterly
2006

Maintaining cultural identity is hard enough for indigenous peoples in countries that are politically stable, but the problems are vastly more difficult when war and persecution push indigenous people into refugee camps across a border. Few indigenous people have had as much experience with those challenges as the Karen.

Riding north along the Thailand-Burma border en route from the town of Mae Sot to Mae La refugee camp, I held on tightly to my friend and translator Htsa Klo as he maneuvered our motorbike down the jungle road in the pouring rain. We shared the road with the cars of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) and other relief agencies, which zipped past us with their windows tinted and their occupants dry inside.

They reminded me of my conversations a few weeks earlier with the director of policy and research for one of the largest NGOs working with the refugees along the Thai-Burma border. Looking to gather interest and support for my research, I had hoped that the NGO would recognize the importance of understanding the cultural concerns of the Karen refugees in Mae La camp, many of whom have been displaced for decades and have been forced to weave a new socio-cultural fabric in a temporary home. She kindly let me know that looking at protection issues related to cultural heritage and cultural rights was “not related enough to the organization’s needs at this time.”

UNHCR, like other aid agencies, is more concerned with physical survival than cultural survival. They are now in the process of registering the refugees in the camp, preparing them to cross new international borders and resettle in third countries such as the United States, Australia, or Canada. As part of this process, the Thai authorities have increased their presence inside and around the camp, making passage into and out of the camp very difficult for anyone without an official ‘camp pass,’ which is given primarily to those working for NGOs. The refugees’ ability to trade with local communities was restricted by the increase in security, as was their access to education, because foreign volunteer English teachers, some having worked in the camps for years, were being told to leave. Without the support of international NGOs and official status, I was concerned about how Htsa Klo and I would cross into the camp and where we would sleep.

Refugees fleeing across international borders, like the Karen living in the Mae La camp in Thailand, face significant threats to the continuity of their traditions. Conflict affects not only refugees’ physical bodies but also the core of their identities. Peoples’ ancestral lands are burned, their houses are looted, prohibitions are often placed on education in native languages, and attacks specifically target those expressing their cultural identity through dress, music, and religious practices. As communities are forcefully disempowered and divided by those seeking political and economic power, their social networks and civil society are destroyed. In the process, they lose the context necessary for transmitting cultural practices and beliefs from one generation to another.

In the camps, people are intimidated or prohibited from practicing certain forms of cultural expression by overcrowding, rules regarding community space and noise, and the convergence of diverse communities in a common space. The lack of freedom to move, trade, and harvest plants makes it hard for people to get the materials they need to produce traditional clothes, crafts, instruments, ritual objects, and medicines. And then there’s the fact that many forms of cultural heritage are intimately tied to specific lands and livelihoods. Children have little opportunity to internalize beliefs and practices out of their original context and indeed may find no utility in many traditional practices so important to elders.

Under these conditions, protecting the treasury of histories, knowledge, practices, and beliefs—what UNESCO terms ‘intangible cultural heritage’—becomes especially important. Unfortunately, this need tends to fall through the cracks in the mandates of institutions set up to provide assistance. Humanitarian and development organizations have unique access to refugee populations and the responsibility to uphold refugees’ rights, including cultural rights. However, either due to unwillingness or lack of resources, their policies don’t consider the cultural concerns of those forced to flee violence and persecution. Organizations such as UNESCO, which are dedicated specifically to protecting cultural heritage, may embrace these issues in theory, but they often are not operational on the ground. Unfortunately, the intergovernmental systems through which cultural concerns might be addressed often leave refugees out of the discussion and formulation of protection policies.

The inspiration for this journey to Mae La camp began with the countless individuals I met in the Balkans, Turkey, and on the Philippine island of Mindanao, who, even after being uprooted from their homes, witnessing the atrocities of war, and, in many cases, being attacked as a direct result of their cultural identity, expressed deep concerns about the preservation of their culture. I wanted to listen to the Karen refugees’ concerns, and find out how the people themselves were addressing these issues.

Two hours after leaving Mae Sot we arrived at Mae La, a community of more than 40,000 refugees, their houses squeezed tightly together along the roadside and spreading into the distance, huddled up against the jungle cliffs. Though maps circulated by UNHCR label the camp as “Karen,” Mae La is in fact an incredibly diverse community. While Sgaw- and Pwo-speaking Karen are the majority, there are many linguistic, religious, and ethnic minorities in the camp, even within the Karen themselves—minorities whose unique identities and cultural needs are not captured by most humanitarian agencies’ demographic analyses. Their commonality lies in their forced flight from their homes in Burma due to the human rights abuses they have faced and the ongoing civil wars between the state and numerous ethnic insurgency groups pushing for recognition and independence. The refugees living in Mae La began pouring into Thailand in large numbers the mid-1980s, when the 55-year-old struggle by the Karen National Union to gain independence intensified dramatically. While families have arrived at different times, many have been displaced over a decade, if not two. In addition to the refugees living in Mae La and other refugee camps in Thailand, hundreds of thousands of Karen remain internally displaced within Burma. And those numbers are swelling as Karen villagers continue to be raped, subjected to forced labor, and even used as human mine-sweepers. Elders in the displaced communities miss their lands and fear dying in exile. Many children born in the camp have never known the homeland of Kawthoolei of which their families dream.

Htsa Kloo stopped our motorbike at the far end of the camp and took a sharp left down a dirt path. He told me he knew a secret way to enter the camp, through a gate at the end of Zone C that is used for the Karen Kawthoolei Baptist Bible School and College (KKBBSC) and its visitors. Nervously walking through the gate and past the Thai army outpost, we found our way to the Bible school. While most of the camp is cramped for space, KKBBSC sprawls across a broad complex, which includes a large library, classrooms, and gardens. There are also dormitories to host students whose families are still in Burma, as well as youngsters from neighboring Thai-Karen villages and even the occasional student from Bangkok. We announced our arrival to the director, Reverend Simon, who welcomed us with a tour and a room for the night. He was careful to ask us about our purpose in the camp and how long we would be staying, while mentioning the many camp visitors—the Koreans who just left and the Europeans who would arrive in a few days. I was both thankful (for my own luck) and amazed at how easy it was for the minister to host groups of missionaries, considering the increased security and the general prohibition against foreigners staying overnight. A student later told me that Reverend Simon has an agreement with the Thai Authorities, who make exceptions for the visitors who come to give Bible lessons and English classes at the school.

Normally, higher education in the camp is forbidden by the Thai authorities, and such activities are often conducted under the guise of religious education in Bible schools. With education and access to the outside world being two of the most prized resources in the camp, the minister’s agreement with Thai security forces and his relationships with foreign religious organizations provide a great asset to the Christian Karen who are able to study at the college. The school’s permanent teachers from India and the steady stream of visitors from Europe, Canada, the United States, and Asia give the students a chance to practice their English—an extremely valuable resource for those hoping to further their education and develop links beyond the camp—and allow them to transcend, even if minimally, their isolation from the outside world. My translator Hsta Klo had achieved his own English skills through religious studies at a mission school not far from the refugee camp.

Seeing the opportunities available in the Bible school, I wondered whether the education policies of the Thai authorities and the obvious support of foreign missionaries might encourage others in the camp to convert to Christianity and leave behind their own cultural practices. In Mae La camp, the Christian Karen community is especially well organized, and their political power within the Karen National Union has enabled them to infuse their ideology into Karen institutions responsible for education and camp affairs. Tun Tun, a local teacher who also organizes a summer course in Pwo Karen language and culture, told me about the many economic, social, and political barriers for non-Christians to establish Buddhist schools or improve literacy in languages other than the Sgaw Karen dialect, which most Christians speak. Not only is it more difficult for Buddhists and linguistic minorities to find funding for their schools, but powerful lobbies within the Christian Karen community have actively tried to block such schools from being formed in the first place. Clearly, NGOs working with indigenous refugees need to be ethnographically informed so they don’t contribute to conditions in which people have to abandon their cultural identity to gain access to scarce resources.

After a nap, we left the Bible school to walk around the camp and meet with community elders, teachers, and young people working on cultural issues. With most of this community having been displaced for years, they have done everything possible to make the camp look and feel more like home. Except for the numerous Thai army checkpoints and the barbed wire fence that forbids entrance, the settlement might appear from the road as a massive, overpopulated, hill-tribe village. The muddy paths are landscaped with jungle plants and flowers, the bamboo houses are not unlike those found in neighboring villages, and they have set aside a large area as a football field and reserved spaces for churches, mosques, temples, and monasteries. Then there is the music, which one hears everywhere: teens playing the guitar and singing songs about love, God, and revolution; church choirs waking the guests of the Baptist Bible School with their early morning praises; Buddhist monks chanting prayers in monasteries; and every so often the calming melodies of the Karen harp, t’nah, wrapping its voice around the sound of falling rain. Underneath the leaf-thatched roofs of their homes, women and their daughters weave the brightly colored bags that are carried by almost everyone in the camp, while elder men and women with red and black stained teeth sit nearby, chewing betel nut in the corner.

On our way to meet a respected elder in the camp’s Buddhist community, we crossed a small bridge, dodging young children running home in their traditional Karen shirts—the required school uniform on Wednesdays—and passed through a large market run primarily by the camp’s Muslim community. It is so well supplied that many Thai-Karen come from nearby villages to do their shopping in the camp. A short distance from the market we arrived at the house of Sein Tin Aye, the Buddhist leader. As we climbed the steps of his home and kicked off our muddy flip-flops at the door, he greeted us wearing a long fluorescent-pink sarong and white button-down shirt. His home was constructed as a temple, marked by a 20-foot-long altar decorated with colorful plastic tassels, Buddhist symbols, posters of monks, and vases of jungle plants and flowers.

Sein Tin Aye originally left his home in the Pa’an district of Burma for the border region in the early 1980s, in order to serve the Karen revolution using his medical skills. He is not your typical doctor, but rather a traditional healer who used his knowledge and spiritual power to help the soldiers suffering from snakebites, malaria, and other injuries and ailments faced by those fighting in the dense jungle. In an interview with the Burmese Border Consortium he laid down his philosophy as a healer: “You must be disciplined and clean in every part of living, in your mind and your body. You can never allow bad thoughts; you must always control your character and be clean.” After the Burmese army became aware of his work on the border, he was forced to come to Thailand, where he has lived for more than 16 years as a refugee, passing on his spiritual knowledge.

In addition to his role as a spiritual elder, Sain Tin Aye trains young people to play traditional Karen music, both independently and with his ensemble, the Golden Pestle. Recently he has also been working as a teacher for a traditional music project initiated by the Shanti Volunteer Organization, a Japanese NGO.

Treating us to sweet instant coffee and strong Karen cigars (cheroots), our host shared his story and his insights into the way his culture is influenced by the conflict and displacement. He brought out a book published inside Burma by the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA), a Karen political and military movement that split from the main Karen National Union and now cooperates with the Burmese military in exchange for self-governance in the areas they control. The book was an effort to create a new writing script that would be mutually intelligible by both Sgaw- and Pwo-speaking Karen. But neither Sain Tin Aye nor my translator could understand the new writing, though they were literate in the Pwo, Sgaw, and Leit San Weit scripts.

Sein Tin Aye recognized the original aim of the endeavor as a way to unite Sgaw and Pwo Karen in a time of conflict and disunity, but he felt that the actual effect would be further divisions between Karen peoples. While people who live in DKBA-controlled territory inside Burma might learn this new script, those in refugee camps and educated in the Karen Education Department’s camp schools (supported by the primarily Christian Karen National Union) would learn only the older Burmese-adapted script for the Sgaw dialect. He feared that if the DKBA project succeeded, over time the two Karen communities might no longer be able to communicate with each other in writing. It is one of many ways in which language, history, and other forms of cultural heritage are co-opted in political crisis as groups try to define their national ethnic identity or assert a political movement’s legitimacy.

Refugees themselves also construct various accounts of the histories and origins of the Karen people as they seek to know where they are from and strengthen claims to the land from which they have been displaced. A week earlier in another refugee camp, Umphiem Mai, I met with Moo Thaw Khee, a member of the Karen Cultural Committee, who is working to create a museum of Karen culture and history inside the Umphiem camp. He spread out his map of the world to teach me about the “Origins of the Karen People,” a version he discovered during his time in the camps, surely under the influence of missionaries. After making some simple calculations, he explained that the Karen people had first lived in the Himalaya Mountains, then left for Mt. Ararat in Turkey during the Great Flood before settling in Babylon for many years. Later, they returned to the Gobi Desert and eventually followed the Salween River to their present lands in Burma and Thailand. Neither of the two Buddhist Karen translators I was with had heard this version of their history and I was not so sure they believed it. While this story of the Karen’s origins may not have anything to do with reality in a factual sense, it demonstrates the needs of displaced people to search for their roots.

Later in the afternoon, Sein Tin Aye’s students and members of his music ensemble, the Golden Pestle, arrived: Two young girls, Eh Khee and Paw Klay, who sing and play the traditional Karen harp (t’nah); Eh Thoo, with his Karen violin (thaw tu); and Thai Thaw Khee, a young man who plays a modern mandolin as well as the t’nah. Following Sein Tin Aye’s direction, they picked up their instruments one by one to demonstrate their skills. The group played both traditional love songs and some of their teacher’s original compositions, which the group planned to present during an upcoming performance competition at the yearly wrist-tying festival, Lah Khu (see the accompanying photo essay). The songs performed by Sain Tin Aye and his group, while using traditional Karen melodies and instrumentation, are heavily influenced by the context of displacement. New songs speak directly about the issues and emotions of refugee life, and older folk stories are re-interpreted to find continuity and meaning in the current crisis. Many of Sein Tin Aye’s compositions speak to the Karen community about the importance of unity and keeping their traditions alive.

While singing, they each held a similar posture: With their spines straight and their spirits internally composed, they stared with a subtle passion, humble and hopeful, upwards and out into the distance.

After all his students had their turn, Sein Tin Aye picked up his k’nat (Karen mandolin) and plucked, slowly and softly, a tune about separation and loss that reminded me of the sweet sadness of an old bluegrass love song. As the evening set in, Htsa Klo and I left Sein Tin Aye’s home after agreeing to return the next day to record a CD for the Golden Pestle that they could give to other foreign visitors and the camp radio station. Passing back over the bridge, where women were washing clothes and bathing their children in the river below, we approached the Bible school and shared our day with the students and our host. We were surprised when Reverend Simon said that due to security we were not allowed to cross the bridge and visit other people and places in the camp. He added, however, that we were more than welcome to spend some days with the students at the Bible school. Not wanting to break our promise to the Golden Pestle nor disobey the reverend, we decided to leave the school that evening and sleep at the home of Sein Tin Aye’s neighbor.

As I fell asleep that night thinking about the next morning’s recording session, I heard Sein Tin Aye’s poignant song again in my mind, a song that seemed to capture perfectly the Karen’s longing for home:

At the end of the road everything is gone.
Many trees and many branches, it is not the same country.
Many new things appear, black and red.

In the foreign lands, by the riverside in the bush,
We sit down together, I hold your hand,
I hold it tight, friendly and tempted.
We must part to foreign lands.


Greg Scarborough is the director of Cultural Cornerstones and is currently a visiting scholar at the Feinstein International Famine Center at Tufts University in Boston. He can be reached at gregoryscarborough@gmail.com. The music of Sein Tin Aye’s group, the Golden Pestle, can be heard at www.culturalcornerstones.org



Venezuela's Chávez Announces World Bank Debt Has Been Paid Off

By: TeleSur/Prensa Web RNV
From venezuelanalysis.com
2007

"With this last payment (to the World Bank), paying off the debt that was almost 3 billion dollars in 1998, I can say to them today that we don't owe a cent of debt either to the International Monetary Fund or to the World Bank," he exclaimed.

President Hugo Chávez Frías, announced this Friday that Venezuela paid off the debt that it owed to the World Bank. "Yesterday (on Thursday) we paid the last installment of the debt (. . .) to the World Bank." Thus he highlighted it during a ceremony that was held around the Palace of Miraflores, right at the heart of Caracas, to commemorate the 13th of April of 2002, the day when a civic-military rebellion restored the constitutional order in Venezuela.

"With this last payment (to the World Bank), paying off the debt that was almost 3 billion dollars in 1998, I can say to them today that we don't owe a cent of debt either to the International Monetary Fund or to the World Bank," he exclaimed. The Venezuelan head of state declared that he felt "happy" about the end of this obligation, after reminding the audience that Venezuela helped the "sister Republic of Argentina pay its debt to the International Monetary Fund."

"I feel very happy that Venezuela has helped Argentina free itself from the International Monetary Fund. Argentina no longer owes anything to the IMF, among other things, thanks to the support of Venezuela," he said.

"We have then transformed Venezuela, from an indebted and bound country that we were, . . . to a modest but important country and financial center that supports other countries and peoples," he added.

This Friday, on the 13th of April, Venezuela was a scene of popular and military ceremonies presided over by President Hugo Chávez, to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the civic-military response that "squashed" the coup d'état of April 2002, which had interrupted for 47 hours the mandate of the Venezuelan president.

The commemoration is made under the motto "Every 11th Gets Its 13th," to remember that the coup of the 11th of April of 2002 got its response on the 13th of the same month, when loyal forces and thousands of followers of the revolutionary process that is alive in Venezuela made the triumphant return of the president possible.