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Guaicaipuro Cuautemoc
[A letter from an Indian chief to all European governments to repay the gold and silver they borrowed between 1503 and 1660.]

Here am I, Guaicaipuro Cuautemoc, who have come to discover those who are celebrating the discovery. Here am I, a descendant of those who colonized America 40,000 years ago, who have come to discover those who discovered it 500 years ago.

My European brother at his border asks me for a written document with a visa in order to discover those who discovered me. The European moneylender asks me to pay a debt contracted by Judas which I never authorized to be sold to me. The European pettifogger explains to me that all debts must be paid with interest, even if it means selling human beings and whole countries without their consent. I am gradually discovering them.

I also have payments to claim. I can also claim interest. The evidence is in the Archivo de Indias. Paper after paper, receipt after receipt, signature after signature show that between 1503 and 1600 alone, 185
thousand kilos of gold and 16 million kilos of silver were shipped into San Lucar de Barrameda from America.

Plunder? May Tanatzin have mercy on me for thinking that the Europeans, like Cain, kill and then deny their brother’s blood!

Genocide? That would mean giving credit to slanderers like Bartolome de las Casa who equated the discovery of the Indies with its destruction, or the extremists such as Dr. Arturo Pietri, who states that the outburst of capitalism and of the current European civilization was due to the flood of precious metals! No way! Those 185 thousand kilos of gold and 16 million kilos of silver must be considered as the first of several friendly loans granted by America for Europe’s development. The contrary would presuppose war crimes, which would mean not only demanding immediate return, but also compensation for damages. I prefer to believe in the least offensive hypothesis. Such fabulous capital
exports were nothing short of the beginning of a Marshalltezuma Plan to guarantee the reconstruction of a barbarian Europe, ruined by deplorable wars against the Muslim foe. For this reason, as we approach the Fifth Centennial of the Loan, we must ask ourselves:

What have our European brothers done in a rational, responsible or at least productive way with the resources so generously advanced by the International Indoamerican Fund?

The answer is: unfortunately nothing. Strategically, they squandered it on battles such a Lepanto, invincible armies, Third Reichs and other forms of mutual extermination, only to end up being occupied by the Yankee troops of NATO, like Panama (but without a canal).

Financially, they were incapable – even after a moratorium of 500 years – of either paying back capital with interest or of becoming independent from net returns, raw materials and cheap material and cheap energy that they import from the Third World.

This disgusting picture corroborates Milton Friedman’s assertion that a subsidized economy can never function properly, and compels us to claim – for their own good – the repayment of capital and interest which we have so generously delayed all these centuries.

Stating this, we want to make clear that we will refrain from charging our European brothers the despicable and bloodthirsty floating rates of 20 or even 30 percent that they charge to Third World countries. We shall only demand the devolution of all precious metals advanced, plus a modest fixed annum accumulated over 300 years. On this basis, and applying the European formula of compound interest, we inform our discoverers that they only owe us, as a first payment against the debt, a mass of 185,000 kilos of gold and 16 million kilos of silver, both raised to the power of 300. This equals a figure that would need over 300 digits to put on paper and whose weight fully exceeds that of the planet Earth.

What huge piles of gold and silver! How much would they weigh when calculated in blood? To say that in half a millennium Europe has not been able to produce sufficient wealth to pay back this modest interest is as much as admitting to the total financial failure of capitalism.

The pessimists of the Old World state that their civilization is already so bankrupt that they cannot fulfill their financial or moral commitments. If this is the case, we shall be happy if they pay us with
the bullet that killed the poet. But that is not possible, because that bullet is the very heart of Europe.

Revista, Renancer Indianista, No7.

Media Release by DEPIM FRETILIN

6.02.2007

Former Timor–Leste (East Timor) prime minister Mari Alkatiri, cleared of accusations he was involved in arming a hit squad to kill political opponents, today called on the country’s leaders to publicly acknowledge their error in forcing his resignation last year.

Dr Alkatiri said president Xanana Gusmao and prime minister Jose Ramos-Horta should ‘have the moral strength to admit they erred’ when they used false allegations to demand his resignation last June.

‘I do not want to have to use the law and judicial system to restore, in its totality my name and image,’ he added.

Dr Alkatiri, who remains secretary general of Fretilin and a member of parliament, also foreshadowed possible legal action against media outlets in Australia which broadcast false, untested and defamatory allegations against him.

‘This now paves the way for me to seek legal redress for the injustice done to me and my family by the politically motivated smear campaign instigated against my good name and character in Timor Leste, Australia and elsewhere,’ he said.

‘False allegations aired with extreme political bias and utmost ill will, have been found to be baseless when subjected to judicial scrutiny.’

Timor–Leste’s Prosecutor-General confirmed last night that his office had dropped an investigation into the allegations because of a lack of evidence, effectively clearing Dr Alkatiri of any wrongdoing.

A United Nations investigation last year also found no evidence to support the allegations but recommended they be further investigated by the prosecutor general’s office.

Dr Alkatiri pointed out he had willingly submitted himself to both the UN and Prosecutor-General’s investigations, unlike anti-Fretilin identities named by the UN investigators as suspected of being involved in criminal activity including murder.

Media Release by DEPIM FRETILIN
5.02.2007

Former Prime Minister of Timor-Leste and Secretary
General of FRETILIN, Dr. Mari Alkatiri was today
notified by the Office of the Prosecutor General of
Timor-Leste that the investigation against him was
closed and that no further action would be taken for
want of evidence of any criminal conduct ON the part
of Dr. Alkatiri arising out the allegations made of
his alleged involvement in the arming of civilians.

The Prosecutor Generals Office concluded from the
investigations that there was no evidence that Dr.
Alkatiri either had any knowledge or participated in
anyway in the alleged distribution of arms to
civilians to warrant any criminal prosecution to be
brought against Dr. Alkatiri.

“I have maintained my innocence with respect to any
knowledge or participation in the matters alleged from
the outset. My family and my supporters vehemently
maintained my innocence in this regard. Anyone who
knows me knows it would have been against my personal
values and my character to be involvement with any
such practices. I, my family and my supporters have
never doubted that the truth would prevail and that I
would be vindicated,” said Dr. Alkatiri.

“I have committed my life to the struggle for justice
by our people. I have been a strident promoter of
truth and justice in our people’s cause, and have
maintained that truth and justice would prevail during
this investigation against me and that I would be
cleared. I submitted myself to the justice system,
unlike some who have been actors in the crisis in our
country of last year, because I believe in a state
based on the rule of law and justice. False
allegations aired with extreme political bias and
utmost ill will has been found to be baseless when
subject to judicial scrutiny,” said Dr. Alkatiri.

“This now paves the way for me to seek legal redress
for the injustice done to me and my family by the
politically motivated smear campaign instigated
against my good name and character in Timor-Leste,
Australia and elsewhere,” said Dr. Alkatiri.

Dr. Alkatiri continues to be the Secretary General of
Timor-Leste largest elected party and has returned to
parliament where he will continue to play a role in
the re-election of his parliamentary party.

Tariq Ali, editor of New Left Review

The triumph of the free market after the end of the Cold War doesn’t mean a free market in ideas. Tariq Ali discusses the way literature can still be a crime against the state.

Every night for eight years a prisoner on Buru Island in Indonesia, condemned to decades in prison, fought against cruelty, disease and creeping insanity by telling his story to his fellow political outlaws. As they listened to him, his fellow prisoners momentarily forgot where they were or who had sentenced them to years of suffering. Pramoedya Ananta Toer was arrested after the military coup in Jakarta in 1965. For 12 years he was a prisoner on Buru Island. The tales he told his fellow prisoners in desperate times later became a much-acclaimed quartet of novels known as Minke’s Story. The first of these, This Earth of Mankind, was published in 1981, topped the bestseller list for 10 months and was banned. The publishing company was forced to close down. Toer had been released in 1979, but his movements are still subject to severe restriction by the Indonesian military dictatorship. He is presently on the short-list of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Getting it could literally set him free.

If we needed a reminder of the hideous intolerance of the world we could look back to the crime that happened in Nigeria a few months ago. The writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, together with several colleagues, was brutally tortured and executed by a military dictatorship heavily dependent on the multinational oil giant Shell. Capitalism’s global triumph after the fall of the Berlin Wall has not, alas, been a victory for the Enlightenment. Even as I write, the hoarse voices of Saro-Wiwa’s murderers are demanding more blood. They want the head of their exiled Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka. They tell us he is free to return to Nigeria. What they really mean is that they can’t wait to kill him. Why? Because Soyinka is using his international status as a writer to plead with the US and the EU for the imposition of oil sanctions against Nigeria’s uniformed assassins. He wants freedom and democracy for his country. Western elites remain deaf to his pleas.

It could be argued that Soyinka, like Saro-Wiwa, is being hounded not because of his literary output but because of his political activity. This is not strictly true. Soyinka’s worldview is visible in most of his plays and novels, but even if this were not the case, why should it make any difference? Saro-Wiwa and Soyinka are respected by the voiceless citizens of Nigeria precisely because of the prestige they have won as writers. In countries where the truth can only be spoken in whispers, those who speak out loudly are heroes.

Circumstances pushed Saro-Wiwa and Soyinka to speak up for their people. There are others, inhabitants of the house of Islam: Naguib Mahfouz in Egypt, Abdur-Rehman Munif in Syria, Salman Rushdie in Britain, Mohamed Choukri in Morocco, the poet Adonis of no fixed abode, and countless writers and journalists in Algiers who are threatened by obscurantist preachers in Cairo, Riyadh, Karachi, Tangiers and Tehran. As Women Against Fundamentalism points out, women have also been targeted. In 1994, Taslima Nasreen, the popular Bangladeshi writer, escaped to Sweden to avoid a fatwa after being charged with ‘hurting religious sentiments’ with her book Shame; Sufia Kamal, a secularist poet, receives repeated death threats; and Lindsey Collen’s The Rape of Sita, a book about violence against women, was banned by the Mauritian prime minister for ‘blasphemy’.

These fictions, we are told, offend the faithful who pray to be delivered from such filth. In reality it is the fundamentalist demagogues who want to restrict the mental horizons of the faithful. They know only too well that in a climate of fear, fiction can assume magical powers. They are especially keen to prevent any real discussion of Islamic history. We are, after all, talking about a culture which has experienced its own renaissance. During the Middle Ages, it was Europe that was full of ignoble savages. There was a time when Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, Baghdad, Aleppo, Homs, Tripoli, Tyre and Ispahan were cosmopolitan cities in which Muslims, Jews and Christians co-existed relatively peacefully. They were important centres of commerce and learning. Tens of thousands of manuscripts were preserved in hundreds of public and private libraries. A majority of the urban male population could read and write. Literature and philosophy were avidly debated in the tea shops, public baths, universities and brothels. Compared to these cities, Paris, London, Mainz and Milan were nothing more than provincial villages. When Mahfouz and Munif sit down to write their novels, they reflect, perhaps subconsciously, the cumulative experience of the Arab renaissance. Their confessional tormentors, on the contrary, are the modern equivalents of the barbarian Crusaders who waged war against the superior civilisation that they found in the East.

In these great times when we are promised a new world order based on freedom and human rights, literature itself has become a crime. Abdur-Rehman Munif was stripped of his Saudi nationality for writing his five-volume Cities of Salt, a fictional account of how US oil companies created a state to defend their interests.

Munif’s books circulate clandestinely throughout his native country, but he is an exile, fearful in the knowledge that his enemies have a long arm, but defiant in his belief that a poet must never stop singing. He told me once that it was the double-standards of the cold warriors in Washington which filled him with nausea. They talked of democracy and human rights in the USSR, Eastern Europe and Cuba, but ‘when the West reached the Mediterranean coasts, they forgot about democracy. All they thought about was oil.’
Mohamed Choukri is aware of the risks he faces. His novels are constantly under attack by television clerics and ‘critics’ in the pay of the government. His autobiography, For Bread Alone, was banned in Morocco and most Arab countries. It was printed by Al Saqi, a London-based Arab publisher and this edition sold 20,000 copies in 18 months. What annoyed the authorities was Choukri’s assault on the grim social conditions of everday life which were reflected inside an ordinary patriarchal Arab household. A characteristic paragraph reads:

‘Each afternoon, my father comes home disappointed. He hits my mother. Several times I’ve heard him tell her ‘I’m getting out, bitch… rotten whore’. He abuses everyone with his words, sometimes even Allah. My little brother cries and squirms on the bed. I see my father walking towards the bed. No one can run away from the craziness of his eyes. He twists the small head furiously. When my father dies I’ll go to his grave and piss on it. I’ll make his tomb a latrine.’

Choukri prefers to ignore his critics. Saturated though they may be in hatred and fanaticism, they ’should not be given the opportunity to enter history in a banal way’. He tells of entering an Islamic bookshop in Morocco and finding Darwin and Nietzsche next to the Koran. On an adjoining shelf there sat Moravia, Sartre and Marx. ‘And yet,’ he smiles, ‘they stop an Arab writer who writes about the same things.’ Morocco is a striking example of paradox and contradiction in an Islamic country which is both fascinated and frightened by modernism.

This is not exclusively an African or Islamic phenomenon. During the midnight of our century, Europe lay in the shadow of fascism and Stalinism. The Germans burned books, and Mann, Brecht, Adorno, Benjamin and numerous others fled the country. Mussolini ordered that Gramsci be imprisoned ‘to stop his mind from working’. Franco’s killers executed Lorca. And in Stalin’s Russia, Mayakovsky was driven to suicide, while Babel, Mandelstam and Meyerhold, to name only three, were killed in the prison camps. Familiar voices fell silent.

After the horrors of the Second World War there was a slight lull on all sides. The Cold War gave us McCarthyism and its thought-police in the Anglo-Saxon world, a pale reflection of its Stalinist counterpart, but destructive none the less. Many decent human beings were forced to lead debased lives, others went into exile. A few were executed as ’spies’.

East of the Elbe there was a marginal improvement. Poets and writers were silenced, but censorship and imprisonment, rather than slow death, became the norm. Pasternak was mistreated, Daniels and Sinyavsky were put on trial. Vassily Grossman was told by the Politburo hack, Suslov, that his masterpiece Life and Fate would not be published in the USSR for hundreds of years. Milan Kundera’s The Joke was regarded by the Prague bureaucrats as an affront, driving its author into exile.

In post-war Europe, a few intellectuals refused to blindly support either Moscow or Washington or, for that matter, the Quai d’Orsay and Whitehall. Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell may no longer be fashionable, but they were courageous thinkers. Sartre’s expose of French atrocities in Algeria and Russell’s campaign against nuclear weapons brought both men together in the 1960s to propose a War Crimes Tribunal whose aim was to try the US for war crimes in Vietnam. This was before the My Lai massacre shocked the world. The Tribunal was not permitted to meet in Paris or in London – so it met in Stockholm in 1967. Those who presided over its hearings were, in the main, intellectuals of one sort or another. They knew that their commitment would make a difference and they were right.

As a new conformity grips the remaining years of this century, we need an intellectual commitment and independence from our writers more than ever before. The existence of the USSR compelled ruling groups in the West to take their socialist critics seriously. The collapse has brought with it a retreat by the left intelligentsia. Depression, hysteria, withdrawal, introversion, suicide (especially in Germany) have all claimed their victims. But it is time to sharpen our pens once again. The lessons from Africa and elsewhere are clear. The task of reviving a critical political culture can not be left to the politicians alone.

I am not one of those who believe that intellectuals deserve special treatment. I do not think that novelists, by virtue of their talent, can simply transcend the problems faced by lesser mortals. The cases cited reveal that the experience of an individual writer is usually the experience of a nation. Writers are singled out because their ability to express knowledge is regarded as dangerous and infectious. They are seen as a cancer that must be rooted out. Western democracies are not interested in the fate of novelists in countries like Saudi Arabia, South Korea or Indonesia. The World Bank lays down tough economic conditions (designed mainly to punish the poor) before it advances new loans to its client states, but basic human rights never form part of any package. Deep down, the free-market fanatics know that a free market in ideas might ultimately challenge their profits. They would rather not take the risk. Is it purely accidental that the ‘Tiger economies’ of the Far East, where capital is more dynamic at the moment than in its old heartlands, are all countries where human lives are cheap, trade unions neutered and intellectual freedoms virtually non-existent? Who weeps for the incarcerated publishers, writers and journalists of South Korea? Not Washington.

And so Saro-Wiwa is executed with impunity by the butchers in Lagos while Toer languishes under house arrest in Jakarta and his tormentors wipe out a whole generation of youth in East Timor. Conditions in South Korea and Singapore are just as bad. So why is Cuba alone privileged with US sanctions? Something is rotten deep in the heart of the New World Order. This is a world whose priorities are determined by the needs of oil companies and the profit margins of arms merchants.

In the old USSR a writer, to be ’successful’, had to accept ’socialist realism’. In the West today there is a growing concentration of ownership of publishing empires and distribution networks in the hands of fewer and fewer robber-barons. They are no more interested in culture than Hermann Goering was. Books are a commodity. The books they want are bestsellers. Pulp fiction is all the rage. It is market realism that dominates Western literature. The new conformity discourages diversity and experimentation; it encourages introversion and celebrates escapism.

It will not last. The mood will pass. When hope is reborn, cynicism and passivity will be buried once again. Then writers in the West will once again lift their heads high and link arms across the continents with their colleagues who continue to sacrifice their lives for freedom.

The Arab poet Adonis remains optimistic: ‘You cannot extinguish light by means of darkness. You can only offer a brighter light, a more beautiful one. Truth cannot be defeated by murder and lies.’ I agree, but try telling that to General Abacha in Lagos and Rupert Murdoch in video-space.