Chapter 7

x million adherents, a large minority that pales, however, in comparison to the other thirty-four million Egyptians - almost all Muslims. The Copts have always lived in insecurity in Egypt, and the recent upsurge in Muslim fundamentalism has caused serious friction. In March and April of 1980 Muslim student riots in the university city of Asyut, which is half Christian, led to the death of at least one student and injuries to and arrests of many others. The Muslims demanded that no Copts be appointed to government posts and imposed other restrictions. Harassment was so bad that the pope of the church, Shenudah III, canceled all non-religious Easter celebrations and retired to a monastery in the western desert to protest harassment by fanatic Muslim groups. Two years earlier, Shenudah and forty-four bishops had cloistered themselves in a Cairo church for a five-day fast. The focus of that protest was a proposed law approved by Sadat's Council of State, the highest judicial body of Egypt, stipulating death for any Muslim who converted to another faith and for anyone who encouraged him to do so - clearly aimed against the Copts and their efforts to proselytize. Churches in Asyut were stoned, and the Coptic community in Houston, Texas, protested to President Carter. According to the Associated Press (September 11, 1977), there had been a rise in Egyptian "demands for a return to the strict traditions of the early days of Islam.” 124 The growing violence against the Copts led to planned anti-Egyptian demonstrations by Copts in America and Australia. The government issued a veiled threat against the Copt protest that would endanger "national unity and social peace," and Sadat, in a nationwide broadcast from Parliament, spent almost twenty minutes condemning the Copts for disrupting the national unity. The Copts are as Egyptian as their Muslim counterparts. Why the tension and threats? They are a large minority, they are educated -- and they are very different. Turkey: Muslims versus Muslims, Armenians, and Orthodox Syrians In December 1978 mobs of thousands of Sunni Muslims in the Turkish city of Kahramanmaras charged through the streets, screaming: "Jihad ["holy war"] for Allah!" Two days later, more than 100 Alawites were dead, more than 1,000 were wounded, and thousands had fled in panic. Said Interior Minister Irfan Ozaydinii: "The fighting sprang from enmity and hatred that had accumulated over the years.” Despairing of a solution (in July 1980 another eighteen Alawites were killed in Corum, a city where their sect makes up 30 percent of the population), thousands of Alawites fled to Syria to join their Alawite brothers; there they can defend themselves against Syrian Sunnis. Others, however, have fled as far as Holland, which has a large (100,000) Turkish immigrant worker population (itself causing friction in that European country). Several score Alawites arrived in 1980 in Almelo and Enschede and went into hiding with other Turkish families. They join thousands of Syrian Orthodox Christian Turks who fled eastern Turkey for Holland out of fear of persecution by Muslims, especially Kurds. Their main refuge is the Dutch town of Hengel, but they won headlines on Good Friday 1979 when 135 of them occupied the Roman Catholic St. John's Cathedral in Bois-le-Duc to demand permission to remain in Holland, lest they be killed in Turkey. And, in 1977, the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia murdered the Turkish ambassador to the Vatican, the fifth Turkish diplomat to be killed by the group, whose goal is vengeance for the massacre of Armenians during World War I and an Armenian state. The massacre of more than two million Armenians by the Turks in that war has never been forgotten, nor has the short-lived independent Armenia that followed the war. On June 14, 1977, the president of the Federation of Turkish-American Societies wrote an angry letter to the New York Times condemning "the mad search for identity by certain
Armenians." Mad or not, the point was well made. Sixty years afterward, the Armenians still seek a separate state and power of their own. This is the Middle East, where Muslims and Arabs appear to be incapable of living in peace with anyone - including themselves - who is "different." Sometimes it is religion, sometimes ethnicity, sometimes language. Sometimes they are a majority, sometimes they are a minority. But always there is the inability to live with the difference. Across the ages come the prophetic words: "And thou shalt call his name Ishmael ... and he will be a wildman: his hand will be against every man and every man's hand against him" (Genesis 16:11-12). And if this is so, what madness holds us in its grip and has us believe that they will live with Jews who differ from them in everyway, who "stole" their land, and who appear today to be weak and retreating? Israel heads inexorably toward another Cyprus. Cyprus Cyprus is an island that in 1960 gained independence, but no peace. No sooner had the struggle by the Greek Cypriots against the British ended that they turned their attention to the Turks. For centuries a large Greek majority of some 80 percent had lived uneasily next to a Turkish minority of about 18 percent. The demand of the Greeks for independence always carried with it a corollary: enosis, union with the Greek motherland. To the Turkish minority, the thought of living under the Greek Cypriots as an 18 percent minority was bad enough; the thought of being part of Greece was terrifying. And so the independence plan called for a "bicommunal" state -- not a federation, but a state in which the Turks would get proportional representation with appropriate vetoes of important issues -- including enosis. Archbishop Makarios, the Greek Cypriot leader, attempted to subvert the agreement in 1963, touching off an ugly war between Greeks and Turks with the Turkish army, just across the waters, ready to step in. In 1974, when the Greek colonels in Athens did attempt to establish total Greek rule over the entire island, the Turkish troops invaded and put an end to bicommunalism. They succeeded by force, fear, and harassment in forcing the Greek Cypriots to go to southern Cyprus, while Turkish Cypriots resettled in the northern part of the island. Decades of bitter fighting led to a solution by transfer of population. Today, Cyprus is in effect two states, each homogeneous, each the sovereign land of a people who could not live in peace with the other.
There are differences from, but striking parallels with, Israel. In both cases, two peoples differ in national, ethnic, cultural, religious, and linguistic qualities. In both cases, the minority has powerful ethnic brethren outside the country, but nearby, who sympathize with their plight. In both cases, the minority is between 18 and 20 percent of the total population. That is all bad enough, but for Israel there is even a worse difference. The Greeks were always the majority and the Turks never claimed the land had been stolen; the most they sought was their share of the land. The Arabs of Israel claim that since they were once the majority, all the land was stolen from them. Israel moves inexorably toward Nicosia. Asia India: Bengalis, Tripurans, Assamese, Muslims, Hindus, Andhras Indian army Major R. Pajamani told reporters: "I wonder whether My Lai [the South Vietnamese village that was the scene of a massacre] was half as gruesome as here." It was June 8, 1980, and the scene was the village of Mandai in the northeast Indian state of Tripura. As many as 2,000 Bengalis had been savagely slaughtered by Indian Tripura tribesmen who raped and burned alive women and children. Tens of thousands of hysterical Bengalis fled from the province. The cause? The Tripura Upaijati Yuua Samiti led a drive demanding the expulsion of all Bengalis who had emigrated from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) since 1947. The influence of the Muslim Bengalis had reduced the Hindu Tripurans to a minority in their own state. Five months earlier, similar riots began in the neighboring state of Assam, whose indigenous Hindu population is descended from Burma's Shan tribes. Millions of Bengalese have fled to Assam over the years, and according to a United Press International dispatch (April 6, 1980): "The Assamese call the Bengalis a threat to their own culture and political life and fear being outvoted in their own state. Assamese students are spearheading a campaign to have Bengalis deported from the state.” In the Assamese riots, mobs armed with swords, spears, gasoline cans, and bamboo sticks stormed Bengali villages, killing hundreds, burning homes, and driving tens of thousands to flee to safety in neighboring West Bengal, an ethnically similar state. The West Bengalis retaliated, blocking the narrow corridor that is the only access to Assam from the rest of the country.
Assam, Tripura, Nagaland, and other northeast states are "seething with extremist demands for national self-determination," according to DPI (April 22, 1980). India itself was born in the bloodbath of a horrible Hindu-Muslim civil war in which countless numbers were killed. Eighteen million Hindus and Muslims fled their homes in a massive exchange of population as they sought safety with their own kind. But India remained a country with astronomical problems. The truth is that India is an artificial state that stands on the verge of falling apart. There are at least a dozen major regional languages, with Hindi the most common in the north. But Hindi is incomprehensible in the south of the country, where Indians speak one of the Dravidian languages. In 1978 the government made an effort to make Hindi the truly official language of the country, causing the chief ministers of the four southern states to meet in Madras and condemn the government for its efforts "to covertly impose Hindi" on people who speak another language. The southern Indians warned: "This conference voices its apprehension that any further attempt to impose Hindi is likely to erode the confidence of the non-Hindi-speaking people in the government." It was a blunt warning that underlined India's fragility and divisions. For it was the bloody riots between linguistic and ethnic groups that forced India's first prime minister, Nehru, to redraw the map of the country to give each major language group a state of its own. It is clearly a stopgap measure, a patchwork designed to gain time. But the bloody communal rioting in India today shows the inevitable ascendency of division over forced, artificial unity. Indeed, even the general Muslim-Hindu problem that was thought to have been solved with partition in 1947 still haunts India. Millions of Muslims still remain in India, and in August 1979 fifteen people were killed and scores injured as a bomb went off at a Hindu religious ceremony in Jamshedpur, and Muslims and Hindus battled in the streets. And, as a kind of immutable footnote: To solve language and ethnic tensions, the forty-five million Telegu-speaking Indians were given their province of Andhra Pradesh. It took twenty-five years, but in 1973 bloody fights broke out as the people of the wealthiest part of the state, Andhra, rioted to demand separation from the poorer part, Telengana. Sixty died as mobs smashed, burned, looted, and shut down the state known as "the rice bowl of 128 India." Differences, where the two competing rivals are large enough, lead to hostility, division, and separation. Sri Lanka: Buddhist Sinhalese versus Hindu Tamils Just twenty-two miles to the southeast of India lies the large island of Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon. In August 1977 two weeks of mutual slaughter between the ten million-strong Buddhist-Sinhalese majority and the three million Hindu Tamils killed 54 (officially) and left 25,000 Tamils homeless. Said a shaken official: "I have seen the beast in man, I have seen men burned alive and women raped and houses set ablaze.” Led by the Tamil United Liberation Front, the Tamils seek a separate Tamil Ealam state in northern Sri Lanka, near their fifty million Tamil brethren in South India. Ironically, the Sinhalese may be unwittingly aiding in just that. Their attacks on the Tamils sent tens of thousands fleeing in an exodus of fear to the northern part of the island. What is happening is the de facto partition of the island. Militant Tamil separatists killed at least a dozen police in 1979. By February 1974 the situation had grown so bad that the government announced that talk of partition was to be a criminal offense. No one believed that the government could jail three million people. And the violence continued. Philippines: Muslims versus Christians More than 2,000 people were killed or wounded in 1978 in the war in the southern Philippines between Muslim secessionist rebels and government forces. According to Deputy Defense Minister Carmelo Barbero, some 60,000 people have been killed in the first seven years of the uprising. About 100,000 Filipino Muslims, in addition, fled to the nearby Muslim Malaysian state of Sabah to find refuge with their fellow religionists. Yes, the Muslim presence is felt in Southeast Asia, too, and the Manila government has been forced to spend more than half a million dollars a day on the revolt. The Filipino Muslims in the south number about two million, mostly on the island of Mindanao. When the Spanish conquered the islands in the sixteenth century, those Muslims who resisted and were called Moros (Moors) were driven south. There they fight today for a state to be known as Bangsa Moro, and the bloodletting continues. Thailand: Buddhists versus Muslims
On September 22, 1977, two grenades exploded at a ceremony attended by the king and queen of Thailand and their two daughters in Yala province. The royal family was unharmed, and the government accused six Muslim secessionists of the attempted assassination. Muslims in the three southern provinces near Muslim Malya, Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat have fought for years for the secession of the provinces with their million Muslims. They are led by the National Liberation Front of the Pattani Republic. Burma: Buddhists versus Muslims No fewer than 100,000 Muslim refugees fled into Bangladesh in the first half of 1978 from Burma, where they claimed the army "had waged a campaign of terror against the country's Muslim minority." The exodus caused a serious rift between the two countries when the president of Bangladesh, Major General Ziaur Rahman, accused Burma of "an inhuman eviction of Muslims.” The "Overseas Chinese": Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia The "boat people" of Vietnam for the most part are not Vietnamese but Hoas -- Vietnam-born ethnic Chinese -- and the Chinese who live outside China proper, in every country in Southeast Asia, are a hated minority. For the most part this stems from the fact that their diligence and hard work have enabled them to control the commerce of the cities. Jealously is a deeply ingrained trait in man. When the object of this jealousy is "different," you have the makings of bloody communal conflict. And so between March and June 1978, 90,000 Chinese fled Vietnam after official harassment, prompted by a desire to "Vietnamize" the economy. In China the refugees would face difficult conditions, at least among their own people. An Associated Press dispatch (June 2, 1978) quoted a Western diplomat: "They prefer China, where they are not a hated minority, rather than Vietnam, where no matter what they do they will be looked down on.” Since then, hundreds of thousands of Chinese have fled as Vietnamese nationalism easily overcomes any fraternal proletarian Communist feelings. For 2,000 years the two people have hated each other. Communism is simply irrelevant in the face of ethnic differences. In Cambodia, where half a million Chinese lived until the Khmer Rouge horror, the new government moved against the Chinese.
According to the AP (August 18, 1976), there are special "cooperatives" that are "reserved for the Chinese where the discipline and security are tighter, the work more grueling, and the rice rations often less than given ethnic Cambodians." At least two special villages were established into which Chinese were herded. One was called Phum Chen Youm, "the village where the Chinese cry.” In two Muslim-dominated states slaughter of Chinese has taken place. In the late sixties one of the worst single massacres in history took place, as millions of Chinese were slaughtered in Indonesia. The government claimed a Communist plot had been uncovered to take over the government, but the Indonesians used the opportunity to eliminate the Chinese community of which they were bitterly jealous because of their economic domination of the country. The other country was Malaysia, where today economic prosperity papers over a smoldering volcano of racial tension between the Malays and Chinese. The Malays make up about 50 percent of the population but hold less than 10 percent of the country's capital investment. The Chinese, who constitute 10 percent of the country, control some 35 percent of the economy. The country underwent a bloody period of Communist insurgency in the fifties. The revolt was as much Chinese versus Malay as ideological, since the Communists were almost all Chinese. Finally, crushed by the British, Malaysia was able to survive only because the predominantly Chinese Singapore wisely seceded, thus changing the ratio of the country from a totally impossible fifty-fifty balance to its present one of nearimpossibility. Indeed, six years after Malaysia came into being, young Malays in May 1969 swarmed into the Chinese district of the capital, Kuala Lumpur, and - with knives and spears - hacked to death every Chinese they could find. Houses were burned, cars smashed; at least 300 died. Today, as a government policy of preferential treatment helps the Malays catch up, the economic boom distracts most people. But as a foreign diplomat told Newsweek magazine (March 12, 1973): "The problems that produced 1969 are still there." Quite true. For all the other problems are based on the essential dilemma: two competing national-religious groups in the same land who are different. Western Europe Nothing more clearly illustrates the power and reality of the differences and the desire of the "different" for their own autonomy and
sovereignty than the incredible upsurge of separatism in advanced, progressive, stable. Western Europe. There - where twenty years ago people spoke of economic and political union of a united western half of the continent - today, there is a veritable rise of tribalism. In Spain, it is Catalonians and Basques; in France, Corsicans and Bretons; in Belgium, Walloons and Flemish; in the United Kingdom, Irish, Scots, Welsh; in Yugoslavia, Serbs, Croats, Albanians, Macedonians. No amount of international pressure can ever overcome the power of difference and the desire for separate power to decide one's future and destiny. Consider: Spain: Basques, Catalans, Galicans, Andalusians The death of Franco may have also been the prelude to the eventual demise of Spain as we know it. At least two and possibly five areas are focuses of demands for autonomy and separatism. In the first six months of 1980 more than sixty people were killed in the area of northern Spain in which live the Basques. They dream of an independent state to be known as Euzkadi, and the terrorist group ETA (Basque Homeland and Liberty) is a serious and deadly force in the land. The central government in Madrid, in a desperate effort to stop Basque terrorism (as an example, on July 24, 1979, Basque bombs went off at Madrid's crowded airport and two main railroad stations, killing 7 and injuring 113, including many tourists, who were the main target), agreed to an autonomy plan that it hoped would satisfy the Basques. Of course, the move only encouraged separatist sentiment (more than half the elected Basque Parliament was either for independence or for much more "autonomy," and the ETA, whose members train in South Yemen, keep blasting their bombs). The retreat of the Madrid government as it allows the flying of the red, white, and green Basque flag (the Ikurrina), control of police, and education (in the Basque language) will guarantee an eventual Basque republic. The second major candidate for separatism is Catalonia, the northeast province of six million people, with proud Barcelona as its capital. In 1932 the Catalonians won a measure of local autonomy known as the Generalitat. Franco abolished it, and after his fall the demand for its restoration erupted. The Catalan flag - yellow with four red stripes - began to fly, and stickers appeared: "I am a Catalan" and "Read, write, and speak Catalan.” The Madrid government agreed to the reactivation of the Generalitat, and thousands welcomed back, from a thirty-eight-year exile, the Catalan leader, Jose Tarradellas, who led them in the Catalan national anthem, 132 "Els Segadors." He told a crowd: "We must be the vanguard of freedom and democracy of all the people of Spain." These include the Galicians in the northwest and the Andalusians in the south and the Canary Islands - all clamoring for "autonomy." Said the pro-Franco paper El Alcazar. "This paves the way for the disintegration of Spain.” France: Basques, Corsicans, Bretons The border between Spain and France separates more than two countries. In the words of the French Basque separatist group Eneata ("Ocean Wind"): "It is a crime against nature and a wall of shame, like the one dividing Berlin." What the group means is that the frontier is artificial, for it divides the Spanish Basque country from the French Pays Basque, and the day will come when "Spanish Euzkadi is liberated. ... French Euzkadi will join us" in a single Basque state. The reason that violence against the French has so far been limited is that the ETA in Spain needs the French Basque region as a sanctuary for escape from Spanish police and soldiers. But there is little doubt that the day of the French Basque is coming. In April 1980 nine Corsican terrorist blasts rocked Paris and Nice; in January of that year armed members of the Corsican People's Union (UPC) seized a hotel in Ajaccio, Corsica's capital; hundreds of bombings attributed to the Corsican National Liberation Front have destroyed fuel tanks, freight stations, and offices. Moderates demand "autonomy," angrily pointing to the French policy of dumping former Algerian settlers, known as pieds noirs, in Corsica. Said Lucian Alforsi, one of the leaders of the Corsican national movement: "If it goes on like this, we shall be a minority in our own homeland." The "extremists," who blew up an Air France Boeing 707 airliner at Ajaccio Airport, are more honest; they openly call for Corsican Independence. The French government will hear of neither independence nor autonomy and has vowed "to protect the unity of the Republic." But police are killed in Corsica, terrorism has reached the mainland, and the Corsicans wish the French well in the unity of France, but they claim that they are not French and not part of that unity. They are different] they want their state. At the end of the fifteenth century, the French annexed Brittany. Today, 500 years later, the demand for autonomy is the loudest it has been in decades. Some 2.7 million Bretons are stirring, and one day before the visit of French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing in 1977, bombs smashed government offices and the radio-TV license fee center in 133 Redon and Rennes. In October of that year, a Breton bomb knocked out a TV relay station. The Bretons are demanding "autonomy" as a first step. They are demanding that the Breton language -- a Celtic language related to Gaelic and Welsh -- be taught in the public schools. In Brittany today "Uncle Tom-ism" is dying a lingering death. Says the sixty-five-year-old mayor of Cast: "Better they learn English or German. What interest is there in learning a language they will never use?" Young Bretons, like folk singer Alan Stivell, sneer at the "Uncle Pierres." These young Bretons are pushing an ethnic sense of identity. "Our grandparents were proud when we spoke French," said a newspaper editor in Quimper. "Now our children are proud when they speak Breton.” The Breton nationalists have made contacts with the IRA. France will lose even more of its stability and "unity of the Republic" in the years to come. The Bretons are not French. They are different. Britain: Asians, Blacks, Scots, Welsh It used to be said, as one looked at the worldwide expanse of British real estate, that "the sun never sets on the British Empire." The sun has no such problem today, as Britain has shrunk to the dimensions of a tiny island. And even that shows disturbing signs of disintegration. In April 1980 a full-scale riot (some termed it an "uprising") occurred in the generally placid southwest English city of Bristol. So violent was the outbreak that the police fled the area, leaving the St. Paul's region of the city to the mercies of the mob. It was a riot of blacks against whites, and the remarkable thing is that, in the words of one account, "it took them and the whole country by surprise.” In terms of color, Britain for centuries was a homogeneous nation. "White as an angel is the English child," wrote poet William Blake, and until World War II he certainly was. Britain recruited tens of thousands of Commonwealth nation people to help it fight the Nazis, and in the postwar labor shortage it allowed in many West Indians to take the menial jobs that the white British did not want. In 1948, with the empire falling apart, the British desperately tried to imbue it with a sense of "Britishness." And so the British Nationality Act was passed, declaring all Commonwealth citizens to be also citizens of the United Kingdom. Britain was never the same. Waves of nonwhites flowed freely into the country so that, today, official figures list some two million of them, representing 3.5 percent of
the population. But most British scoff at this, for the government conveniently ignores the number of illegal immigrants. Thus, if the government claimed that 43,000 nonwhites immigrated to Britain in 1978, police estimate that some 90,000 more arrived illegally. In general, the nonwhite residents by 1979 were broken down as follows: West Indies, 620,000; African Asians, 180,000; African Africans, 110,000; India, 430,000; Pakistan, 240,000; Mediterranean (Cyprus), 160,000; Oceania/Asia, 130,000; Bangladesh, 50,000. It is interesting, of course, to note that some of the immigrants came because of ethnic persecution in their old homes (the Asians expelled from Africa by blacks; those from Bangladesh who fled Bengali - non-Bengali clashes). The immigrants tended to gather in major urban areas, so that more than 10 percent of the population of London is nonwhite. Sections of Bradford, a textile center, look more like India than the Midlands, and some Birmingham (England) schools look like those of Birmingham, Alabama. There is hate in England, today, on both sides. Despite a Race Relations Act that makes it illegal to incite racial hatred, in 1978 bloody rioting took place in Netting Hill; in 1976 racial clashes occurred in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, and Blackburn. In June 1976 and again in April 1979 vicious riots took place in the London suburb of Southall, which houses the largest concentration of Indians and Pakistanis. And in the almost all-black neighborhood of Brixton one can see the smoldering anger and hatred. The white British see the nonwhite influx as another symptom of their national decline. The difficult economic times and social depressions combine with the feeling expressed by an attorney who revisited his old neighborhood of Peckham, now racially mixed: "I was amazed. I felt completely alien. I felt pressure" In a word, many white British feel that they are losing "their" country. It does little to point out that by law those nonwhites are as "British" as Blake's "white angel." The "Blacks out!" graffiti, the regular clashes, the growth of the neo-Nazi National Front, which has sizable support in the troubled areas - all point to the growing problem. For years, the British smugly accused the United States of racism and prejudice in regard to its nonwhites, but that was when less than 17 percent of the United Kingdom was nonwhite. Things have changed, and Conservative Member of Parliament John Stokes could rise and warn of "a takeover of this country by alien peoples." In 1968 people scoffed, but
today they remember the words of Enoch Powell, a member of the House of Commons: "We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents [of immigrants]. ... As I look ahead I am filled with foreboding. I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.” The struggle in Northern Ireland is too well known to require detailing here. It is an ongoing battle that began in 1690 with the Battle of the Boyne, and the partition of Ireland into one independent Catholic state and another predominantly Protestant dependency never wrote finis to the struggle. Two important lessons can, however, be learned from the bloodbath: 1. The two Irish opponents are similar in every way except religion. This has not prevented atrocity and horror. 2. For decades the Irish question appeared to be settled and the Irish Republican Army seemed to have faded away because of apathy and indifference on the part of the population. Deep differences may indeed lie dormant, but they do not die. They merely await the proper moment. The discovery of oil in the North Sea brought hope to economically beaten Britain and also an upsurge in a Scottish movement of independence. Suddenly, the Scottish nationalists jumped from a group that had received 2 to 3 percent of the popular vote to one that garnered 30 percent. The reason was clear: economically depressed Scotland was faced with the possibility of a huge income from the oil, all of which lay off what would be its shores if it were independent. That, and the knowledge that it was tied to an England with serious political, social, and racial problems that Scotland did not need, suddenly gave a frightening urgency to London's need to soothe the Scottish separatist beast. The House of Commons, after bitter debate, approved limited home rule for Scotland in 1978, a move that infuriated Englishmen and that failed to satisfy Scottish nationalists. What is certain is that this major constitutional change in the United Kingdom is a major step in its unraveling. As the United Kingdom becomes much less so, the Welsh nationalists, such as the Plaid Cymru and Adfer, will grow. One of their leaders, Gynfor Evans, says: "This country indeed needs independence." For most people, the growth of separatism and independence movements in Britain is little short of incredible. The lesson for Israel, however, is an important one: if after centuries of quiet acceptance, within the context of a stable, integrated United
Kingdom, people of the same religion and general culture can be so divided by ethnic and historical origin, what conceivable hope is there for Arabs and Jews to live together in a land in which they differ in every way and which the Arabs look upon as stolen from them? All the Rest Western Europe alone embraces some thirty different unassimilated ethnic communities. Not universalism but separatism, autonomy, and independence are their dreams. Belgium: Incredibly, this politically and economically advanced country faces the ravages of division over the question of language. The creation of Belgium in 1830 brought together Dutch-speaking Flemings in the north and French-speaking Walloons in the south. The French dominated the power and the Flemings, now 60 percent of the population, claimed their share of it. Language was the issue, again and again, for language symbolized difference. Crisis bred patchwork solutions, such as the surrealistic one in which the Catholic University of Louvain was partitioned in 1968 into separate Flemish and Walloon branches: the odd-numbered books went to the new French-speaking campus and the even-numbered ones remained. Bitter street battles took place over language in a country whose national motto is "In Unity There Is Strength." After yet another government fell on the language issue in April 1980, Flemish Christian Social Senator Jan de Meyer said: "The state may appear to exist still, but it is rotten. It will take very little for the Flemings to go off in one direction and the Francophones in the other.” Portugal: In 1978 riot police fought a pitched battle with a gun-firing mob in Ponta Delgada, capital of the Azores. The previous weekend a crowd had physically beaten Portugese Deputy Prime Minister Antonio Almeida Santos. It was all part of separatist demand for independence for the Azores from Portugal. The islands are 1,000 miles from the mainland and "different," and they are supported by some million Azoreans living in the United States and Canada. A similar independence movement is led by the Front for the Liberation of Madeira, a group demanding freedom for that island some 350 miles from Portugal. Austria: In November 1972 bilingual signposts in German and Slovene were removed in the Austrian province of Carinthia, which is about 25 percent Slovene, a Yugoslav minority. Yugoslav President Tito warned that he would "not tolerate" Austrian treatment of "our minorities." (Of course, Tito had enough problems with minorities in his
own country, as we shall see.) The Slovenes are demanding linguistic "autonomy.” Italy: Conversely, the Austrians bitterly complained about alleged mistreatment of the German minority in the Alto Adige region of Italy, known as the Tyrol to Austrians. The area was severed by diplomatic fiat after World War I. After more than 200 bombings by German-speaking terrorists in the late 1960s, a measure of autonomy was granted, but streets are called via by Italians, Strasse by Germans, and the situation quietly worsens. And The Lapps of Sweden, Greenland's Eskimos, who demonstrate against "Danish imperialism," the Frisians in northeastern Holland -- all agitate for "autonomy." And then there is the fascinating problem of nationalism in: Communist Europe Yugoslavia: Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Albanians, Macedonians With the death of Tito in 1980, most fears focused on whether the Soviets might attack Yugoslavia and pull it back into Moscow's orbit. But the greater question lies in whether the country can keep from falling apart from within. In an effort to cope with rapidly rising nationalism, Tito established a federated system for six constituent republics and two autonomous republics. For Yugoslavia was not a state but a patchwork of eight major ethnic groups and six other minor ones. When it was created in 1918 from various South Slav groups, it was an artificial entity. Until World War II it was deeply divided, with the capital of Belgrade favoring the Orthodox Serbs. Most of the conflict arose with the Roman Catholic Croats. World War II added to the bitterness, since many of the Croats favored the Nazis and the Croat fascist Ustachi movement massacred hundreds of thousands of Serbs. The Serbs never forgot, but Croatian nationalists never ceased their striving for national autonomy. Under men like MikaTripalo and Matica Hrvatska nationalism festered, with Zagreb University seized by Croat students in 1971 and Serbs and Croats trading increasing insults. Of course, the most dramatic indication of the hatred and longing for separation has been the activities of Croatian nationalists outside of Yugoslavia. Hijacking an airline, seizing a consulate in Chicago, shooting officials in Europe -- these are external proofs of the conflict that simmers beneath Yugoslavia's surface.
Yet another problem is Macedonia. In 1878 the Treaty of San Stefano gave Macedonia to Bulgaria. A few months later the Treaty of Berlin took it back and gave it to Serbia. The Bulgarians claim that there is no such thing as a "Macedonia," that the people are racially Bulgarians. The poorest province in Yugoslavia is Kosovo, inhabited by Albanians who have powerful cultural and family ties with their brethren in neighboring Albania. In 1968 riots shook Kosovo as demands for separation led to violence. This occurred again in 1975, but in March 1980 as Tito lay dying, it was announced that a major trial of fifty Albanian nationalists would be held. The charge was detailed in the Belgrade daily Politka: "They distributed hostile banners and pamphlets, spread untruths about Yugoslavia, and advanced irredentist standpoints in connection with our country.” The government has made efforts to defuse the nationalist demands. This means radio and television, books, magazines, and newspapers in eight languages. What the Yugoslavs -- and Israelis -- cannot understand is that to satisfy national separatism by catering to it will soothe it for a while, but the very concessions only feed and strengthen the separate identity and appetite, invariably leading to an ultimate explosion. Rumanians versus Hungarians All East European states were virulently nationalistic before they became Communist. All East European states today are Communist and are still virulently nationalistic. Between the two world wars, Poles, Slovaks, Rumanians, Hungarians, Russians, and Lithuanians hated each other with a passion. After World War II a great international game of musical chairs was played whose major purpose was to push Russia westward. Thus, Poland lost her eastern territories and 1 million Poles to Russia but received the eastern portion of Germany. Czechoslavakia lost Ruthenia with its Slavs to the Russians but gained parts of Germany. And Rumania lost Bukovina and Bessarabia to Russia (they now form the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic) and received some 1.8 million Hungarians along with Transylvania. Indeed, the Hungarians lost another 600,000 to Czechoslavakia and 200,000 to the Soviet Union. Let no one doubt that there are ferment and discontent in Eastern Europe today. Not only are the Soviet satellites sitting on an ethnic explosion, but the most fascinating and dangerous nationalistic time bomb of all ticks away within the huge expanse of territories known as -- The Soviet Union
The Soviet Union is a giant with massive arms of steel and feet of clay. The base on which it stands is rotten and bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction. For there are no fewer than 100 nationalities, religions, and ethnic groups in the USSR, and the ethnic Russians, according to 1980 figures, officially have dropped to 52.4 percent of the total population. As the other ethnic groups become the majority of the state, the virus of nationalism that is the Kremlin's secret terror will grow more dangerous. At the moment, the Russians mostly fear the more articulate and broadly "European" minorities -- the Ukranians, Lithuanians, Rumanians, Georgians, Armenians -- and, indeed, they should. The specter of Ukranian nationalism, in particular (the Ukranians constitute 20 percent of the population), is said to have been one of the factors in the Soviet invasion of Czechoslavakia. An "independent" national communism on the borders of the Ukraine might have endangered the very foundation of the Soviet Union by a massive infection of nationalism. The advanced European minorities look down with contempt on the Russians, and it would not take much to trigger serious dissension. But it is in Asia that the Russians face an awesome force of separatism. According to 1979 figures, the birthrate of the six Muslim republics in central Asia was five times the national average. Not only that, but Western sources have estimated that because of the higher proportions of young people among the Asians, the armed forces may be half Asian and Muslim. And it is known that serious tension already exists. On May 22, 1978, reliable sources reported that a massive race riot had erupted in Dushanbe, capital of the Central Asian Soviet Republic of Tadzhik. At least 13,000 people were involved and the bloody clash was put down by troops from the 201st Motorized Rifle Division. An eyewitness spoke of crowds shouting "Colonialists!" Tadzhik is one of several Muslim Asian republics in the USSR where both religious and nationalist problems persist. The others are Uzbek, Kazakh, Azerbaidzan, Turkmen, and Kirghiz. At the jubilee session marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet Union, President Brezhnev spoke of Soviet achievement in "completely solving the nationality problem in accordance with Lenin's principles." Any hope the Soviets may have of evolving "one Soviet people" from all those whose nationality, language, religion, and culture differ is surely already understood to be a delusion. Indeed, Brezhnev himself admitted as much in his Kremlinesque jargon when he added: "Nationalistic prejudices, exaggerated or distorted national feelings, are extremely tenacious, as they are deeply embedded in the psychology of politically
immature people." In far more honest words: There is a serious nationality problem in the Soviet Union. It, along with any Chinese effort to retrieve the "lost Chinese territories" seized by the czars, could drive the Soviets to acts of desperation that might lead to a world war. There are many other examples of the drive for separatism because of "difference." There is the tribalism of Africa and that of the New World, and the qualitative differences are less than they would seem to be. In Africa blacks clash violently with whites in southern Africa and then turn on the Asians, who pose an economic threat to them. It was not only mad Idi Amin who expelled his 28,000 Asians. In 1976 the moderate state of Malawi began to expel its 20,000 Asians. It was "statesman" Julius Nyerere of Tanzania (and on his island of Zanzibar, Africans slaughtered their Arab former oppressors). And in the wake of the Soweto riots in South Africa, the Washington Post (June 27, 1976) quoted an Asian storekeeper who had been wiped out by rioting and looting: "We got caught in the middle. The blacks took out their fury on our property because we're not black. The police didn't protect us because we're not white. What can we do? It's like that for us all over Africa." Differences. White, black, brown. Differences and the need to be separate. And in Africa it is the tribalism of Nigeria, where a Muslim north crushes a Christian and pagan Biafra; Uganda, where Kakwas clash with Lugbaras; Katanga, which seeks to secede from Zaire (Belgian Congo); Burundi, where Tutsis and Hutus have slaughtered 100,000 of one another; Chad, with fifteen years of civil war between an Arab and Muslim north and a south made up of pagans and Christians; a Somali people that claim huge parts of Ethiopia and Kenya because those areas are inhabited by a majority of Somalis. The tribalism of Africa. And in the New World, Canada, where the governor-general, Edward Schreyer, in April 1980 asked the Canadian Parliament: "Will Canada exist as a country at the end of this decade, or will it have been broken up by the terrorism of our past and recent history?” For Schreyer the thought was terrifying. Not so for the Parti Quebecois (P.Q.) of Quebec's Premier Rene Levesque. To him, a people with a common language, customs, and culture should naturally form a nation-state. The French of Quebec fear that North America's "Anglo" culture will swamp them. Says poet Fernand Ouellette: "In a milieu of bilingualism there is no coexistence; there is only a continuous aggression of the language of the majority.”
And ever since November 15, 1976, when Canada awoke to find that the P.Q. had received a majority mandate in the Quebec Parliament, the French separatists have slowly moved toward that goal. With moral support from France (in 1977 French President Giscard d'Estaing assured Levesque of French support), the separatists have moved to make life more difficult in Quebec for non-Frenchmen. In August 1977 a law known as Bill 101 made French the only official language and radically limited the right of new residents to send their children to Englishspeaking schools. It was a de facto move toward separatism. Ever since the British defeated the French under Montcalm in 1759, the French have chafed under British rule. They are Catholic, Frenchspeaking, and French in their ethnicity and life-style. They are different. Two separate nations live in Canada, and the French wish to give both their own sovereign independence. And the United States - not as united as we might think. For thirty years after the war, the United States enjoyed the good life that allows problems to simmer. But they existed, and they have emerged today in all their fury. More than twenty-five million blacks are "different," very different. In the sixties they broke through resignation and apathy. They burned, looted, killed. It is not over. The hate remains and the blood has been tasted. And there are the Hispanics: millions of Chicanes in the Southwest and California, Puerto Ricans in the slums of the East and Midwest. The same ingredients of the black mixture exist for them, but more so, for the Hispanics have territorial demands. For the Puerto Ricans there is the cry of "Viva Puerto Rico Libre!" Since 1974 the terrorist F.A.L.N. has claimed responsibility for more than 100 bombings that killed five people. Attacks on U.S. troops in Puerto Rico have taken place. Plans had been made to attack the Democratic National Convention in New York in 1980. For the Chicanes there is the Southwest, once Spanish, part of Mexico, taken by the United States in the nineteenth century. Absurd? Not to the millions of Chicanes who live there - and who grow more militant. And there are the American Indians and their International Indian Treaty Council, who told a UN Conference of Discrimination Against the Indigenous Populations of the Americas that the United States is stealing "their resources." And the Eskimos of Alaska, who have joined with those of Canada and Greenland to form the Inuit (Eskimo)

Circumpolar Assembly. At the first conference in Barrow, Alaska, they declared: "The Inuit of Greenland, Alaska, and Canada are one indivisible people with a common language, culture, environment, and concerns.” Blacks, Hispanics, Indians, Eskimos, Orientals -- the making of a minority coalition of forty or fifty million people who are different from the majority, different from each other. Different and unhappy. This is the world of many, many worlds. It is a fragmented, separate, and individualistic world in which each group seeks identity, separation, the right to be itself and decide its own destiny. For the Jews to believe that the Israeli Arab, with every possible difference imaginable, will quietly cede his destiny to the Jewish state is to invite catastrophe. How did the Quebecois poet put it? "In a milieu of bilingualism there is no coexistence; there is only a continuous aggression of the language of the majority.” What does the Israeli Arab say about the "aggression" of the language, religion, culture, and destiny of the majority? For Israel there is only one answer: removal of the Arabs from Israel, before the land turns into an ongoing nightmare of mutual communal horror. There is nothing novel in the concept of removing a hostile minority from a land to which it poses a dangerous, irredentist threat. It has happened before.