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By Root 1724 0

are—or can be taught by media-savvy demagogues to think they are—“indigenous” or black, and where the rich can easily be depicted as colonizing “white” “outsiders.” Mallku’s slogans in Bolivia are frighteningly similar to those of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe: “We indigenous peoples are like foreigners in our own ancestral lands”; “We are governed by whites who have stolen our power and land”; “While we are ruled by this minority of whites and mestizos the crisis will continue”; “The whites should leave the country”; and, “Our blood has been spilled and must be atoned for.”

28 Mallku’s fellow Aymara Evo Morales, who also champions nationalization on the ground that the “indigenous people” are the “absolute owners” of the land, shocked observers by placing second in Bolivia’s 2002 presidential election, behind the white mining magnate and former president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada.

CHAPTER 7

Backlash against

Market-Dominant Minorities

Expulsions and Genocide

In Omarska, Keraterm, and other Serbian death camps in 1990 and 1991, torture was recreational; the victims were typically executed anyway. In one case a guard cut off one prisoner’s ear and forced another prisoner to eat it. In another case a man’s testicles were tied to the back of a motorcycle, which then sped off, leaving the man to die of massive blood loss.

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In Rwanda in the 1990s, a Tutsi woman, who had already seen seven members of her immediate family shot or hacked to death, begged a kindly Hutu couple to hide her twenty-month-old son from roaming death squads. The couple took the boy in, then killed him.

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Under what conditions do human beings do such things?

Ethnically targeted confiscations and autocratic crony capitalism are hardly optimal outcomes. But things can get unimaginably worse. In a frightening number of cases, democratization in the face of a market-dominant minority has led to government-encouraged attempts to “cleanse” the country of the minority altogether. Strategies for doing so include forced emigration, expulsions, and in the worst cases pogroms, extermination, and genocide. Typically, such policies are triggered by aggravating circumstances, for example an economic crisis, a border war, or the fortuitous rise of a particularly effective, hate-filled demagogue. Almost always, such policies are passionately supported by an aroused and angry “indigenous” majority, motivated by tremendous feelings of grievance and inferiority.

Induced Emigration and Expulsions

In some cases a majority backlash against a market-dominant minority takes the relatively mild form of oppressive language requirements, discriminatory education laws, and discriminatory citizenship and economic policies, all intended to “encourage” the resented minority to “voluntarily” leave the country. For example, in the non-Russian republics of the former Soviet Union, Russians were for years an economically and politically dominant “colonizer” minority, typically dominating key industrial and technical positions and occupying the best housing. Perestroika and political liberalization exposed the brutalities—including purges, deportations, and mass deaths—of the Soviet era, provoking widespread anti-Russian outrage among the indigenous majorities. In nearly all of the non-Russian republics, independence and democratization spawned a host of discriminatory laws, job-firings, and even violence. As a result, between 1989 and 1996 more than two million Russians, especially from Central Asia and Transcaucasia, abandoned their homes in favor of the chaos of post-Soviet Russia.

Meanwhile in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, anti-Jewish violence and political hatemongering in recent years have contributed to a large emigration of Jews to Israel (about 67,000 in 1999) and to Western countries (about 30,000 in 1999). Similarly, in Indonesia, popularly supported anti-Chinese economic policies pursued by the Habibie government in 1998, together with widespread anti-Chinese violence, prompted approximately 110,000 Sino-Indonesian families (including most of the wealthiest)