116    Nationalism and the End of Colonialism
In contrast to the British, the Dutch had no intention of granting inde** pendence to the Dutch East Indies, a colony made up of many Southeas Asian islands, which the Dutch had exploited for three centuries. Bu Dutch intransigence was met by equally strong resistance on the part of th. Indonesian nationalists. During World War II, the Japanese military ruler who controlled the Dutch colony gave their active support to an anti* Dutch, nationalist organization known as Putera. By the end of the war, this organization, under the leadership of Achem Sukarno, had develope a 120,000-troop army. When news of Japan's surrender reached Jakarta the capital, Sukarno, who had been under intensive pressure from the mor radical student element in Putera, quickly drafted a declaration of Indone sian independence. He read it on August 17, 1945, to a huge crowd tha had gathered to celebrate the event. At about the same time the British landed an occupying force to receive the Japanese surrender and to main tain order until Dutch forces could arrive.                                              *
The Dutch returned with a design to restore colonial rule, only to b, confronted by a strong nationalist movement with a large, well-equippe army and by an even more hostile Communist movement. Negotiation produced a compromise plan in late 1946 whereby the Dutch would rec ognize Indonesian independence only on the islands of Java and Sumatr on the condition that this new Indonesian republic remain within the Dutc colonial empire in a "Union of Netherlands and Indonesia." Indonesi leaders, however, rejected this plan, and when the Dutch resorted to polic action to quell demonstrations in July 1947, they were met by armed r sistance. Despite United Nations efforts to arrange a cease-fire and diplo' matic pressures by the United States and Britain on the Dutch, the Indon sian war of independence continued for another two years, with thousand, of casualties on both sides. Finally, in 1949, the Dutch conceded, and* fully independent Federation of Indonesia came into being with Sukarn as its president.
■   THE FRENCH IN INDOCHINA
j The French, not unlike the Dutch, were also opposed to granting indep: dence to their Asian colony in Indochina, and their efforts to reimpcŕ colonial power there would also meet with failure.                               ;
France's colonial presence in Vietnam dates back to 1858, when-' troops occupied the Mekong River delta in the south. By 1883, when native ruling dynasty submitted to French rule, the French extended tli rule to the Red River delta in the north. The conquest of Vietnam was^" complete. But, according to the Museum of the Revolution in Hanoi struggle against this latest manifestation of foreign domination of Vie began on the very day the French had extended their dominion over
Decolonization in Ask    117
-letnám.7 At first, defiance consisted of unorganized peasant uprisings, the French quickly suppressed. At the turn of the century, French 'e, not unlike that of other colonial powers elsewhere, appeared to be se-ire. Vietnamese nationalists, humiliated by the French presence, found emselves incapable of challenging the colonial power. Imprisonment and s public use of the guillotine had their intended impact. ' ;The early career of Ho Chi Minh is a case in point. Later in life he jight and defeated the French, but as a young man he could do no more i humbly request justice for his native land. In 1919, he happened to be ng in Paris, where the victors of World War I were meeting to decide the : of the losers. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson had come to the confer-'ce as the champion of national self-determination, the one who spoke for 'eaiights of all subjugated peoples. Ho Chi Minh submitted a petition to the /delegation in the hope that Wilson would intervene on Vietnam's be-. But the delegates had more pressing issues to consider, and the French, ose overriding concern was the punishment of Germany, were in no mood scuss with a U.S. president (with whom relations were strained as it e) their colonial rule in a faraway land. Ho's calls for amnesty for all po-l prisoners, equal justice, freedom of the press, and "the sacred right of peoples to decide their own destiny" fell on deaf ears.8 iln the following year, Ho became one of the founders of the French ; mmunist Party. His attraction to Communism, he wrote later, was bese he saw it as the only political movement in France that concerned it-s"a great deal with the colonial question." Communism, for Ho Chi h, thus became a vehicle for national liberation of his native land from ccession of French governments that professed the sacred principles of alism and democracy. Ho's identity as a Marxist and anticolonialist ■■ it impossible for him to return to Vietnam and took him to Moscow 924, at a time when the Kremlin began to officially focus on domestic blems and all but abandoned its ideological commitment to internaal revolution. By the late 1920s, he made his way to China, where rev-'onary ferment promised to spread to the rest of Asia. For nearly ;ty years, he remained a man without a country, living in exile and -g for a chance to return to Vietnam to challenge the French. "'•The opportunity came in 1941, during the early years of World War II. 'French army, the world's best on paper, had collapsed in the face of ""erman attack in the spring of 1940. In the following year, when the _ese swept over Southeast Asia, the French again offered little resis-iJapan had humbled one of Europe's great powers, but this proved to i solace for the Vietnamese since they merely exchanged one mas-" other. The Japanese conquest of Southeast Asia, however, put into us the vulnerability of the European colonial presence in Asia, a :?was not lost on the Vietnamese, who at the end of the war de-' e end of French colonial rule.
118    Nationalism and the End of Colonialism
In the meantime, Ho Chi Minh returned to Vietnam in 1940 to create a native resistance movement, the Viet Minh (the League for the Independence of Vietnam), and turned against the Japanese, who now controlled Vietnam. Thus, by a strange twist of fate, Ho and the United States became allies during World War II in their common struggle against the Japanese empire. The United States recognized the usefulness of the Viet Minh, and in fact the OSS (the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA) provided Ho with weapons and supplies.
When the war ended in 1945, it was Ho and his men who controlled much of Vietnam. France's colonial ambitions in Southeast Asia seemed to be at an end. Toward the end of the war, President Roosevelt had urged the French to follow the U.S. example in the Philippines and grant Vietnam its independence. But the French, humiliated in World War II and insisting on the restoration of France as one of the world's great powers, refused to accept the loss of a prized colony. They sought refuge in a page out of the nineteenth century, which equated colonialism with national pride and prestige. They insisted on reasserting their authority as they had done in the past.
In the meantime, Ho Chi Minh declared the independence of Vietnam in Hanoi on September 2, 1945. He drew on hallowed French and U.S. political documents to justify a Vietnam free from colonial rule. Ho made use of The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen from the French Revolution of 1789 and the U.S. Declaration of Independence, a copy of which was given to him by an OSS official. Talks between Ho and the French came to nothing. At a minimum, the Vietnamese insisted on a genuine measure of autonomy within the context of the French empire. The French, however, were not interested in coming to the conference table to oversee the dissolution of their empire. The French navy eventually replied with a classic example of gunboat diplomacy. In November 1946, the French fleet bombarded the Vietnamese sector of the port of Haiphong. According to French estimates, 6,000 civilians died in the shelling of the city. The French then marched into Hanoi, and the first Indochina War began.
■   THE FIRST INDOCHINA WAR
Initially, the Viet Minh proved to be no match for the French army, which possessed superior weaponry as well as more troops. The French were able to put airplanes, tanks, trucks, and heavy artillery into battle. In a conventional head-to-head clash the French were destined to win. The Viet Minh, therefore, had no choice except to pursue the tactics of the weak against the strong: guerrilla warfare.
Guerrillas (from the Spanish meaning "little war") have no chance of defeating their more powerful enemy in a decisive tattle, because they
Decolonization in Asia    119
simply do not have the means to do so. They rely instead on a series of small campaigns designed to tie down the enemy army without engaging it directly. Once the enemy forces bring their superior power into play, the guerrillas break off the fight and withdraw, leaving the battlefield to the conventional forces who then plant their banners and proclaim victory. Armies fighting guerrillas can often point to an uninterrupted string of "victories," in the traditional sense of the word. The guerrillas are almost always "defeated."
But such a scenario is frequently misleading. Ché Guevara, who was one of the better known practitioners of guerrilla warfare and who had fought alongside Fidel Castro in Cuba in the 1950s, compared a guerrilla campaign to the minuet, the eighteenth century dance. In the minuet, the dancers take several steps forward and then back.9 The "steps back" are of central importance to the guerrillas. They cannot afford to hold their ground since they know they will be decimated; therefore, they must always retreat after going forward. They must gather their dead and wounded and their supplies, and then reorganize to fight another day. Little wonder that the conventional forces are always able to claim that they are winning the war and that it will only be a matter of time until the guerrillas suffer their "final" defeat.
The guerrillas' victory comes only after a prolonged struggle that wears down the enemy physically and psychologically. Of utmost importance for the guerrillas is the conduct of political action necessary to gain recruits for their cause. For conventional forces, the conflict is frequently of a purely military nature; in contrast, successful guerrilla movements always focus on the psychological and political nature of the conflict'. The French Colonel Gabriel Bonnet reduced this to a quasi-mathematical formula: "RW = G + P (revolutionary warfare is guerrilla action plus psychological-political operations)."10
In Vietnam, the French forces generally held the upper hand, and with it came repeated predictions of victory. But they were unable to suppress the insurrection. The Viet Minh always managed to reappear and fight again. And, thus, what was intended as a short punitive action by the French turned into a long and costly war of attrition. And because all wars have political and economic repercussions, successive French governments were beginning to feel the heat. At the outset of the war, the French public had supported the efforts to suppress an anticolonial rebellion, but as the years went by and the financial burden became increasingly heavy, public dissatisfaction grew.
In 1950, the United States became involved in the Korean War, which it considered part of a general Communist offensive in Asia across a wide front. Its view of the Viet Minh insurgency was no different. President Harry Truman became concerned with the French position in Vietnam, and he thus became the first U.S. president to involve the United States in that
120    Nationalism and the End of Colonialism
region when he offered the French financial aid. (When the war ended in 1954, most of the French expenditures in Vietnam were being underwritten by the U.S. taxpayer.)
But the U.S. line of reasoning that revolutions have no indigenous causes but are fomented instead from the outside (a view that lies at the core of Washington's view of the Cold War) proved to be a questionable one in this case. The Soviet Union offered the Viet Minh no aid, and when the Chinese Communists came to power in 1949, Ho Chi Minh emphatically rejected the idea of using Chinese troops against the French although he did accept Chinese supplies, particularly artillery. Chinese-Vietnamese enmity is age-old, and Ho feared the Chinese, their Communism notwithstanding, as much as he did the French. But once the Truman administration took the position that the struggle in Indochina was part of a global Communist movement, the anticolonial rebellion in Southeast Asia was destined to become a focal point of the Cold War.
After years of fighting, the French public grew tired of the war. Predictions of victory by French generals and politicians had proven to be hollow promises. In desperation, the French military command hoped to find a solution to the elusiveness of the Viet Minh guerrillas, to entice the Vietnamese to stand up and wage a conventional battle. The bait was the enticement to attack the remote outpost of Dien Bien Phu, near the border of Laos. If the Viet Minh took the bait, it would result in a conventional showdown and they would be crushed. The French, after all, possessed superior firepower and they controlled the air and the roads leading to Dien Bien Phu.
General Vo Nguyen Giap, the military genius of the Viet Minh, decided to oblige the French, but only after he had made adequate preparations for the battle. With great difficulty he brought into combat heavy artillery, which the Viet Minh had not used previously to any great extent. To the surprise of the French, Giap managed to place the artillery on the hilltops overlooking the valley of Dien Bien Phu, and the decisive battle of the war began. The French soon realized their position was doomed and they appealed for U.S. intervention. Some of President Eisenhower's advisers urged a nuclear strike, but Eisenhower rejected this option because he understood that nuclear weapons are tools of destruction, not war. It made no sense to incinerate Dien Bien Phu—French and Vietnamese alike—to "save" it. Eisenhower refused to become involved in Vietnam, particularly after the Senate majority leader, Lyndon Baines Johnson, told him that the U.S. people would not support another war in Asia, particularly in light of the fact that the cease-fire in Korea had been signed only the previous year.11
The battle of Dien Bien Phu ("hell in a very small place," in the words of the French historian Bernard Fall) took place in the spring of 1954. In early May, the French garrison finally fell and with it some of France's finest soldiers. Two thousand of the French forces died; 10,000 were taken
Decolonization in Asia    121
prisoner, and only 73 managed to escape.12 The French defeat was total and the French role in Indochina was over. The French government and the public both welcomed the end.
By coincidence, the world's leading powers—both Communist and capitalist—were engaged at that time in discussing several issues in Geneva. The French and Vietnamese agreed, after the battle of Dien Bien Phu, to take their dispute to this forum. At the conference, however, the Vietnamese Communists received precious little support from the other Communist powers, the Soviet Union and China, both of whom were more interested in other issues. As a consequence, the talks produced a strange agreement. The Geneva Agreement called for a Vietnam temporarily divided along the 17th parallel with a Communist government in the north and a non-Communist government in the south. This division was to last only until a nationwide election, scheduled for July of 1956, could be held. The election was intended to give the country a single government and president and to bring about the "unity and territorial integrity" of Vietnam. In the meantime, the agreement demanded the neutrality of both regions of Vietnam, north and south.13
The U.S. delegates at Geneva were hypnotized by a specter of a monolithic Communism. But they need not have worried. Both the Communist Chinese and the Soviets were more interested in cutting a deal with the French than in coming to the aid of their Vietnamese comrades. It appears that it was the Chinese foreign minister, Zhou Enlai (Chou En-lai), much to the surprise of the French, who first proposed a division of Vietnam. The Vietnamese, under Chinese and Soviet pressure, finally yielded, but they insisted on a dividing line along the 13th parallel, which would leave the Viet Minh two-thirds of the country. The French insisted on the 18th parallel; under Chinese and Soviet pressure, the Vietnamese backed down and accepted the 17th parallel, which cut the country roughly in half. At the farewell banquet, Zhou hinted to the South Vietnamese delegation that he favored a permanent partition of Vietnam. This suggestion reflects China's centuries-old animosity toward Vietnam rather than solidarity among Communist nations.
The Viet Minh also yielded on the question of the timetable for the scheduled election. They wanted an election as soon as possible to cash in on their stunning defeat of the French. It was the Soviet foreign minister, Viacheslav Molotov, who asked rhetorically: "Shall we say two years?"14 The French and the U.S. delegates quickly endorsed Molotov's proposal. It was the best deal the U.S. delegation could hope to obtain. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was not happy with the prospect of pitting a candidate hand-picked by the United States against the popular Ho Chi Minh. He knew full well that a free election throughout all of Vietnam would bring Ho to power. Earlier in the conference, Dulles had cabled the U.S. ambassador in Paris:
122    Nationalism and the End of Colonialism
Thus since undoubtedly true that elections might eventually mean unification Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh this makes it all more important that they should be held only as long after cease-fire agreement as possible and in conditions free from intimidation to give democratic elements best chance. We believe important that no date should be set now.15
As it was, losing even half of the nation to Communism did not sit well with Dulles. It was for this reason that the United States refused to sign the Geneva Agreement. In a separate statement, however, the U.S. negotiator, Gen. W. Bedell Smith, on behalf of President Dwight Eisenhower, pledged U.S. adherence to the agreement.
The postponement for two years of the creation of a single government for Vietnam had predictable consequences. In a development reminiscent of Korea and Germany, two separate governments came into being: a pro-Western regime in the south (with its capital city of Saigon) and a Communist dictatorship in the north (with the capital in Hanoi). The United States soon began to prop up the anti-Communist government in the south, which it dubbed as "democratic," and which refused to abide by the Geneva Agreement calling for free elections. The elections were never held. Instead, the United States became increasingly tied to the unpopular and repressive regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam. From the very beginning, the United States provided military assistance, as well as economic aid, thus sowing the seeds for direct U.S. intervention once the very existence of the Diem regime was threatened.
For U.S. government leaders, South Vietnam became the gate guarding the "free world," and the United States became "the guardian at the gate." Once that metaphor took root in popular thought, the anti-Communist regime in South Vietnam became identified with the very survival of the United States. For psychological, geopolitical, and domestic political reasons, therefore, U.S.-South Vietnamese relations became a Gordian knot that a succession of U.S. presidents did not dare to cut. When Diem was challenged by an insurgency in the late 1950s, the second Indochina War began.
RECOMMENDED READINGS
India and Pakistan
Brown, W. Norman. The United States and India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. 3d ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972.
A lucid treatment of Indian independence and partition and the subsequent division of Pakistan.
Hutchins, Francis G. India's Revolution: Gandhi and the Quit India Movement. Cambridge, Mass.: University Press, 1973. An excellent analysis of Gandhi's role in the Indian nationalist movement.
Decolonization in Asia    123
Merriam, Allen H. Gandhi vs Jinnah: The Debate Over the Partition of India. Calcutta: Minerva, 1980.
Recreates the debate between Gandhi and Jinnah over partition, with many quotations from the speeches and writings of each man.
Thorne, Christopher. Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War with Japan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
An authoritative study of Britain's wartime and immediate postwar policies regarding its colonies in Asia.
Vietnam
Giap, Vo Nguyen. People's War, People's Army. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962.
Giap's assessment of the nature of wars for national liberation and the reasons for his victory at Dien Bien Phu. Introductory biographical sketch by Bernard B. Fall.
Fall, Bernard B. Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966. The definitive history of the battle by a recognized French expert.
Fall, Bernard B., ed. Ho Chi Minh on Revolution: Selected Writings, 1920-66. New York: Praeger, 1967. A valuable collection of primary sources.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam: History of the Indochina Incident, 1940-1954. Washington, D.C.: Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1955; declassified 1981. The Pentagon's critical assessment of why the French lost.
Lacouture, Jean. Ho Chi Minh: A Political Biography. New York: Random House, 1968. A standard biography of the Vietnamese revolutionary.
Patti, Archimedes. Why Vietnam? Prelude to America's Albatross. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
An account of immediate postwar Vietnam by a U.S. OSS officer who established a working relationship with Ho Chi Minh in 1945.
NOTES
1.  Gandhi's career of passive resistance to the laws of Britain that he considered immoral drew upon the writings of the nineteenth-century U.S. writer Henry David Thoreau, and in turn Gandhi's philosophy influenced the U.S. civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr.
2. As quoted in Francis G. Hutchins, India's Revolution: Gandhi and the Quit India Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 143.
3.  Churchill once expressed the view that the Indian National Congress represented hardly anybody except lawyers, moneylenders, and the "Hindu priesthood." Ibid., p. 284.
4.  Southeast Asia refers to the area of Asia stretching from Burma to the Philippine Islands, and includes such countries as Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia.
5.  Given the large Chinese population in Singapore, the Chinese would have been the majority population in the new Malaysian union that Britain proposed, and it was for this reason that Muslim leaders opposed its creation.
132    Nationalism and the End of Colonialism
■    THE FRENCH DEPARTURE
The French colonial system was different from the British, and this meant that the decolonization process was also different, even though the timetable was similar. The aim of French colonial policy had been the assimilation of its African colonies into the French empire and the transformation of the African natives into French citizens. The blacks were enjoined to abandon their own culture in favor of the "superior" French civilization. They were taught the French language and culture, and the elite among them received their higher education at French universities. No attempt was ever made to prepare the native Africans for independence; however, because the colonies were part of the French empire, they were permitted to send elected representatives to Paris where they held seats in the French National Assembly.
There always was a problem with the French program of assimilation in that it assumed that the population of the French African colonies wanted to become and in fact were somehow capable of becoming "French." In the case of Algeria, the assimilation of Muslim Arabs proved to be impossible, as the French settlers and the Arabs both rejected it. The Arabs always understood that they were, first and foremost, conquered subjects. The lot of the Africans south of the Sahara was little different. There was no point for black schoolchildren to recite the lessons written for their counterparts in Paris: "Our ancestors the Gauls had blue eyes and blond hair." At its worst, assimilation as Paris envisioned it was racist; at its best, it was unabashedly ethnocentric. A greater French union of France and the former colonies could only have succeeded on the basis of equality and on the recognition of cultural and racial diversity.
Until the mid-1950s none of the short-lived cabinets in postwar France responded to the African demands for self-rule. However, at this juncture, shortly after abandoning its colonial empire in Asia, France was faced with a revolutionary movement in Algeria and a growing demand for independence in its other African colonies. With the exception of Algeria, where the French refused to budge, the African colonies of France were surprised to find a new French receptiveness to change. The French no longer insisted upon assimilation; instead, they began to search for a workable alternative.
African nationalists who desired the liberation of their people still found it necessary to work within the French system. The most politically successful of the black African leaders from the French colonies was Felix Houphouet-Boigny, a medical doctor from the Ivory Coast. Shortly after World War II, he had taken the lead in forming an African political party, which championed the cause of the blacks. As a member of the French National Assembly, Houphouét-Boigny played a leading role in drawing up a new colonial policy that set in motion the movement for
Decolonization in Africa    133
colonial self-government. The effect of this bill, which was passed by the assembly in 1956, was to permit greater autonomy for the separate French colonies, which heretofore were under one centralized colonial administration. Each colony was now to have a French prime minister and African vice-ministers, and elections for legislative assemblies under universal suffrage. Meanwhile, in the various French colonies, Houphouét-Boigny's party established branches, which began organizing for elections under the banner of nationalism.
Still, it remained the intention of France to maintain some form of indirect control over its African colonies. A plan for continued association was endorsed by President Charles de Gaulle, after he came to power in Paris in May 1958. Later that year he offered the twelve separate sub-Sa-haran colonies the option of membership in the French Community or immediate and full independence. The former meant autonomy, but continued association with France; more important, it meant continued French economic and military aid. This was the preference of all of the colonies except Guinea, which courageously opted instead for independence. In response to Guinea's decision, France immediately pulled out all of its personnel and equipment and terminated all economic aid in hopes of forcing the maverick back into the fold. Guinea, however, stuck with its decision.
The example of Guinea, and nearby Ghana as well, inspired the nationalist leaders in the neighboring French colonies in West Africa. In 1960, after two years of agitation and negotiations, President de Gaulle abruptly granted independence to all of the remaining French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa. These new nations were relatively unprepared either politically or economically for independence, and consequently they tended to remain politically unstable and economically dependent on France for years to come.
■    THE FRENCH STRUGGLE IN ALGERIA
France's determination to retain control over Algeria must be viewed in the historical context of its war in Vietnam, a conflict that had drained the French people emotionally, physically, and economically. When defeat came in 1954, the French accepted the loss of Vietnam without bitter recrimination. Vietnam had become a burden to be lifted from their shoulders. There were few dissenting voices in the spring of 1954 when Prime Minister Pierre Menděs-France promised to end the war by granting the Vietnamese their independence. With the Geneva Conference of July 1954, the French colonial presence on the Asian mainland came to an inglorious end. Yet, within five months of the Geneva settlement, the French faced once more the prospect of losing a colony. This time it was Algeria. The French, however, having lost one colony, were in no mood to accept again
134    Nationalism and the End of Colonialism
a humiliation at the hands of a colonized people of a different color and religion. At stake were France's honor, its role as a great power, and its position in Africa.
The French insisted that Algeria was not a colony but an integral part of France, a province across the Mediterranean, in the same manner that Brittany, Alsace, or Lorraine were provinces of France. More important, Algeria was the home of 1 million French citizens who considered themselves to be living in France. Algeria is "part of the republic," Menděs-France insisted; it has "been French for a long time. Between it and the mainland, no secession is conceivable. . . . Never will France . . . yield on this fundamental principle." The minister of the interior, Francois Mitterand, added: "Algeria is France."1
France's presence in Algeria dated back to 1830 when its troops first landed there. It took the French seventeen years to complete the conquest of a people who spoke Arabic and professed the faith of Islam, a religion remarkably impervious to Christian missionaries. (For a summary of Islam, see Chapter 18.) In 1848, the first French, Roman Catholic settlers arrived. The French quest for empire here became a bitter struggle between two cultures and two religions. In 1870-1871, in the wake of France's defeat in its war with Prussia, the Arab population rose in rebellion. The uprising was put down in blood and was followed by the widespread confiscation of Muslim lands. Algeria became a land divided between the immigrant French, who had seized the best lands along the coast and who enjoyed the rights and protection of French citizenship, and the native Algerians for whom the law offered little protection. The French always justified their colonial conquest as part of their civilizing mission, yet the blessings of French democracy were meant only for Europeans in Algeria, not for the indigenous Arab and Muslim population.
In the years between the two world wars (1918-1939), the French government grappled repeatedly with the question of the status of native Algerians. Liberals, both French and Algerians, urged the integration of the Muslim Algerians into French society by granting them citizenship without first having to convert to Catholicism. To that effect, in 1936 France's premier, Leon Blum, proposed a bill granting a number of select Arabs—soldiers with distinguished records in World War I, teachers, graduates from French institutes—the privilege of French citizenship even though they continued to profess the faith of their ancestors.2 Unrelenting opposition killed the bill—and with it the opportunity of integrating Algeria with France.
A synthesis of Algerian and French societies was a pipe dream pursued by a liberal minority. The French settlers in Algeria refused to consider it; the same may be said of most Muslims. They, too, could not envision themselves as French. As one Muslim scholar put it: "The Algerian people are not French, do not wish to be and could not be even if they did
Decolonization in Africa     135
wish."3 Children in Muslim schools were taught to recite: "Islam is my religion. Arabic is my language. Algeria is my country."4
World War II was fought for the noblest of reasons: against fascism, racism, and colonialism, and for democracy and human rights. It was little wonder that at the end of the war the colonial peoples in Asia and Africa demanded the implementation of these ideals for which, moreover, many of their compatriots had died fighting in the armies of the colonial powers. Inevitably, after the war the Algerians presented the bill for their services to the French.
The first manifestation of the new Algerian attitude became apparent even before the guns fell silent in Europe. On May 1, 1945, during the May Day celebrations in Algiers, Algerian demonstrators staged an unauthorized march carrying banners denouncing French rule and demanding Algerian independence. The French attempt to halt the demonstration led to the deaths of ten Algerians and one Frenchman. The French then boasted that they had ended all disorder. But several days later, on May 8, 1945, the V-E (Victory-in-Europe) Day parade in the Algerian city of Setif turned into a riot. The French had hoisted their victorious tricolor-. Algerian participants, however, had their own agenda. Again they came with banners calling for the independence of Algeria—and one young man defiantly carried Algeria's forbidden green-and-white flag with the red crescent. A police officer shot him to death.
This act touched off an anticolonial rebellion. The heavy-handed French response brought into combat police and troops as well as airplanes and warships to bomb and strafe villages. The British, as they did later that year in Vietnam when they secured that colony for the French upon the defeat of the Japanese, came to the assistance of the French colonial administration when they provided airplanes to carry French troops from France, Morocco, and Tunisia. When the fighting was over, the French conducted wholesale arrests—the traditional French policy after colonial outbreaks. The French killed between 1,165 (according to their official count) and 45,000 Arabs (according to Algerian estimates).5 The OSS (the Office for Strategic Services), the U.S. wartime intelligence-gathering organization, put the number of casualties between 16,000 and 20,000, including 6,000 dead.6 The rebellion claimed the lives of 103 Europeans. On May 13, the French staged a military parade in Constantine to impress upon the Algerians the decisive nature of their victory. The Algerians quickly found out that World War II had been a war for the liberation of the French from German occupation, not for the liberation of the French colonies from French domination.
French society was nearly unanimous in its response to Algerian defiance. Politicians of all stripes, including the Communist Party—whose official position was one of anticolonialism and which later opposed the war in Indochina—strongly supported the suppression of the uprising. The
136    Nationalism and the End of Colonialism
French colonial authorities admitted that the violence had been in part the result of food shortages. They refused to acknowledge, however, that the rebellion had been fueled primarily by a deep-seated opposition to French colonialism.
For nine years relative stability prevailed in Algeria. When the next rebellion broke out it was not a spontaneous uprising as had been the case in 1945. This time the revolution was organized by the FLN (Front de liberation nationale), which turned to the traditional weapon of the weak— terror.7 Terrorists have little hope to defeat an adversary whose military strength is formidable. They seek, instead, to intimidate and to keep the struggle alive in the hope of breaking the other side's will. The conflict became one of extraordinary brutality. The FLN resorted to bombing attacks against European targets; the Europeans then, logically and predictably, bombed Muslim establishments. Moreover, the French army responded with its own version of terror by torturing and executing prisoners in order to uncover the FLN's organizational structure. In 1956, Parliament—with the express support of the Communist Party—granted Gen. Jacques Massu of the Tenth Parachute Division absolute authority to do whatever was necessary. The subsequent "Battle of Algiers" ended with the destruction of the FLN's leadership. Brute force had triumphed over brute force and within a year the uprising appeared to be over.
But the rebellion continued, nevertheless, as new leaders emerged. Algerians, such as Ferhat Abbas, who had devoted their lives to cooperation with the French, joined the rebellion. The million French settlers in Algeria demanded an increase in military protection. French military strength, initially at 50,000, rose to 400,000. In the end, between 2 and 3 million Arabs (out of a population of 9 million) were driven from their villages to become refugees, and perhaps 1 million had died.
Gradually, many in France began to comprehend the unpalatable truth that Algeria would never be French. By the late 1950s, the French, who had been unified on the Algerian question in 1954, began an intense debate of the subject. The war now divided French society to the point that it threatened to touch off a civil war. One of the telling arguments against the continued French presence in Algeria was that it corrupted the soldiers who were serving in an army guilty of repeated atrocities. Many French (not unlike many of their U.S. counterparts during the war in Vietnam) became more concerned about the effect the killing, the brutality, and the torture had on their own society than their impact on the Arab victims. The costs of the continuing struggle were outweighing the benefits. The time had come to quit Algeria.
It took an exceptional political leader to take a deeply divided France out of Algeria. The colonials in Algeria continued to insist that as French citizens they had the right of military protection; the army, too, was determined to stay. By 1957, the gravest issue before France was no longer the
Decolonization in Africa    137
Algerian uprising, but a sequence of "white rebellions," which threatened to topple the constitutional government of France itself. Only a politician of the stature of Gen. Charles de Gaulle was able to accomplish the difficult task of resolving the Algerian dilemma without plunging France into civil war. De Gaulle had emerged from World War II as the sacred symbol of French resistance to Nazi Germany and had thus salvaged France's honor. In May 1958, he announced that he was ready to serve his nation once again. After he became president in June 1958, he sought at first to resolve the conflict by offering the Algerians what all previous French governments had refused. He announced the rectification of inequalities between Arabs and Europeans, which included the Algerians' right to vote. In this way, Algeria was to remain a part of France. Arab nationalists, however, rejected this solution, which may have worked before hostilities had commenced in 1954. Now nothing short of independence would do. De Gaulle's choices were now narrowed down to two. He could either crush the rebellion—or withdraw. He chose the latter. In the summer of 1960, he began talking publicly of an "Algérie algeriénne" which, he declared, would have "its own government, its institutions and its laws."8 When he took an inspection trip to Algeria in December 1960, the European residents organized a general strike to protest his policies. They demanded an "Algérie frangaisel" But it was to no avail. The time had come to put to rest the myth that native Algerians could be French and that Algeria was part and parcel of France.
In July 1962, de Gaulle quit Algeria in the face of intense opposition within his own army and from the settlers in Algeria, nearly all of whom left for France and never forgave de Gaulle for his act of betrayal. Only 170,000 French residents remained when Algeria formally declared its independence in July 1962. This event essentially marked the end of France as a colonial power.
■   THE BELGIAN AND PORTUGUESE DEPARTURES
The Belgian government paid even less attention than France to preparing its colonial possession, the Congo, for self-government, and yet it quite abruptly granted independence to that huge colony in June 1960. The Belgian Congo, which had once been the private domain of King Leopold, was one of the largest and richest of the African colonies. The Belgian colonial policy of enlightened paternalism was designed to allow the African workers a modicum of material advancement while denying them political rights. In response to the wave of nationalism that had spread over the continent, and especially to the outbreak of insurrection in the city of Leopoldville in early January 1959, the Belgian government hastily issued plans for the creation of what was meant to be a new democratic
382     The Third World
and Hong Kong fifth. The PRC was fourth. "ROC Rated Top for Birth Curbs by World Group," Free China Journal, December 21, 1989.
14. The Communist regime of Kim II Sung in North Korea had resorted to terrorist attacks on South Korea, the most shocking of which was the killing of several South Korean cabinet members in a bomb attack in Rangoon, Burma, in October 1973. Speculation was rife in the South that North Korea might even demolish a dam upstream on the Han River and flood Seoul prior to or during the Olympic Games.
15.  In February 1947, an anti-Nationalist uprising occurred that was suppressed with enormous violence, leaving between 5,000 (the Nationalist figure) and 20,000 (the Taiwanese figure) native Taiwanese dead. Over the years, Jiang's government forbade anyone from speaking of this massacre on punishment of death.
16. The platform of the new party, the Democratic Progressive Party, called for full implementation of democracy, welfare, and self-determination for Taiwan.
17. "New Record Set in Exodus," Free China Journal, December 22, 1988.
18.  David Rees, A Short History of Modern Korea (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1988), p. 168. In 1975, U.S. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger stated explicitly that in the event of a North Korean attack, the United States would not become involved in "endless ancillary military operations" but would "go for the heart" of its opponent.
19. North Korea had consistently opposed the entry of either of the two Koreas into the United Nations and had been able to count on a Soviet veto, but now it had to acquiesce. In September 1991, both Koreas were admitted.
20. North Korea said it would permit inspections only if U.S. nuclear weapons were completely removed from South Korea. In 1991, Washington announced its intention of pulling out all of its nuclear weapons from the South.
21. "Placing Bets on a New Korea," The Economist, December 21, 1991, pp. 27-28. In 1990, South Korea had over five times higher per capita income and twenty times more foreign trade than the North; the latter spent more than 20 percent of its meager GNP on its military, whereas the South spent only 4 percent of its burgeoning GNP on its military.
22. Walter Russell Mead, "More Method Than Madness in North Korea," New York Times Magazine, September 15, 1996, p. 50.
16
The Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia
■   THE POPULATION AND POVERTY OF INDIA
The Himalayan Mountains separate the two Third World giants—China and India. India shares many of China's problems, not the least of which is a burgeoning population. About one-fifth of the world's population lives on the India subcontinent, which consists mainly of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Many of these people live in poverty. In the postwar era, India and the other heavily populated nations of this region struggled to hold population growth in check and to elevate the standard of living, but only recently have they met with moderate success. Although they shared many of the same problems, these nations have not lived in peace with one another. Hostility between India and Pakistan has flared up several times, and both countries have confronted violent internal disorders. The maintenance of large armies to deal with these problems has drained the limited resources of each of these quarreling neighbors.
To speak of India is to speak of population and poverty. At the time of the partition in 1947, India's population was about 350 million, and it has grown steadily ever since at a rate of almost 3 percent a year. This meant an average annual increase of about 5 million people in the 1950s, 8 million in the 1960s, and 13 million in the 1970s. In the mid-1990s, the population was over 960 million—more than double that of 1947. Moreover, about 40 percent of the Indian people were concentrated in the Ganges River basin, where the population density was among the highest in the world. Although in the mid-1980s India had eight cities with over 1 million inhabitants, over 80 percent of the people still lived in rural villages, and most were dreadfully poor.
India's primary task was to feed its huge population. The twin aims of the Indian government, therefore, were population control and increased food production. Although the government tried to implement a birth control program, it had minimal effect in rural areas. The largely illiterate villagers
383
384     The Third World
were suspicious of the purpose and methods of birth control, and they clung to the age-old ideas that a large family was a blessing and that it represented wealth and security. Moreover, one way Indians combated the high infant mortality rate was simply to have more children in the hope some would survive. But even where birth control had some effect, it did not produce an immediate decrease in population growth. Offsetting the slight decrease in the birth rate was a declining death rate; thus, the pressure of overpopulation on India's economy remained undiminished. An electronic display in New Delhi reminded Indians that in mid-July 1992 the country's population stood at 868 million and was increasing by 2,000 people per hour, 48,000 per day, or 17.5 million per year.1
Indian food production increased steadily following independence, but it remained barely adequate. In general, the rate of increase of output was slightly higher than the rate of population growth, but this was offset by occasional years of crop failure caused by droughts or flooding. Moreover, the increased food production was unevenly distributed. Indian agriculture consisted largely of subsistence farming and was one of the world's least efficient in terms of yield per acre. Among the reasons for this inefficiency were the small size of farms, the lack of sophisticated tools and machinery, a general lack of irrigation, a tradition-bound social system, and widespread malnutrition. The last of the reasons suggests a cruel cycle of cause and effect: malnutrition and disease contributed to low agricultural productivity, which in turn led to greater poverty and hunger.
In India, as in the other agrarian nations in this part of the world, a wide gulf existed between the wealthy landowners and the more numerous poor peasants, many of whom were landless. This great discrepancy between well-to-do farmers and the rural poor was an age-old problem that was inherent in the traditional society and the farming system. The practice of dividing land among sons contributed to making the average family farm so small that it did not support the family; thus, the farmer was often forced to borrow money at high rates of interest to make ends meet. All too often, he was unable to repay the loan without selling what little land he had. The result was a steady increase in the number of landless peasants.
More recent developments—the so-called Green Revolution and agricultural mechanization—produced an increase in agricultural output in India, but they also made the gulf between rich and poor even wider and increased rather than diminished the poverty of the majority of peasants. The Green Revolution refers to the introduction of newly developed plants—high-yield varieties of wheat and rice—and new farming techniques to grow the new types of grain.2 In certain areas of India, wheat production doubled between 1964 and 1972, and the new rice strains had a similar effect when introduced in the late 1960s. The Green Revolution,, however, turned out to be a mixed blessing at best. It benefited only the: minority of India's farmers—the wealthy landowners who could afford the
The Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia    385
new seeds and the additional irrigation works, fertilizers, and labor required to grow the new high-yield grain. The majority of the rural population—small landholders, landless peasants, and dry-land farmers—lacked the capital or the means to borrow enough money to grow the new crops. Not only were they unable to reap the benefits of the increased food production, but they were actually hurt by it; the increased yield lowered the market price for grain crops, which meant a lower income for peasants who still used the traditional mode of farming. The Green Revolution thus made the rich richer and the poor poorer.
The mechanization of farming, meaning primarily the increased use of tractors, had a similar effect. On the one hand, it contributed to a rise in food production; on the other hand, mechanization benefited only those who could afford the expensive new equipment, and it brought greater hardship to the poorer peasants. Specifically, the use of farm tractors greatly reduced the need for farm laborers and, by eliminating many jobs, increased the ranks of the unemployed. More and more impoverished villagers of India were reduced to collecting firewood and animal droppings to sell as fuel. Even progress sometimes breeds poverty.
One of the consequences of the dislocation of the landless in the countryside was the overcrowding of Indian cities. Many of those who migrated to the cities joined the ranks of the unemployed and found life little better there than in the villages they had left. Large cities' such as Calcutta and Bombay were teeming with hungry and homeless people, many of whom literally lived and died in the streets. In the mid-1980s, in Calcutta—which had a population of about 11 million—around 900,000 people were living in the streets without shelter.
■   INDIA'S ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
India's efforts to modernize its economy and increase industrial production met with moderate success. India opted for a mixed economy, whereby major industries such as iron and steel, mining, transportation, and electricity were nationalized—that is, owned and operated by the government. The government instituted its First Five-Year Plan for economic development in 1951. The plan's relatively modest goals for increased industrial output were attained, and it was followed by a sequence of similar five-year plans. In 1961, at the conclusion of the second plan, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru admitted that his country "would need many more five-year plans to progress from the cow dung stage to the age of atomic energy."3 Although some impressive large-scale, modern industrial plants were built, most of India's industry remained small in scale and lacked modern machinery.
The overall growth rate of India's economy was steady but insufficient. Following independence in 1947, India maintained an average annual
386     The Third World
growth rate of GNP of between 3 and 4 percent.4 A large gap also existed between the incomes of the educated elite, technicians, and skilled laborers in the modern sector and the unskilled laborers and peasants in the traditional sector—not to mention the many unemployed or underemployed city dwellers.
India was handicapped by most of the problems of Third World countries: a lack of capital, difficulty in attracting foreign capital, illiteracy, and a lack of technology. To this list one might add social conservatism—the weight of tradition, especially a Hindu religious tradition around which much of Indian life is centered. The remnants of the ancient caste system militated against social mobility and the advancement of all members of society. Ethnic and linguistic diversity was also an obstacle to economic modernization. Still another factor retarding India's economic growth was the continual "brain drain" the country experienced. Many of India's best foreign-trained scientists and engineers chose not to return and remained in Western countries, which provided career opportunities and creature comforts unattainable in their native land.
One important prerequisite for economic development is the existence of a market, either domestic or foreign. In India, the poverty of the masses meant a lack of purchasing power and, thus, the lack of a strong domestic market. India strived to increase its exports of raw materials and manufactured goods to pay for its large volume of imports—a substantial portion of which consisted of petroleum, foodstuffs, and industrial equipment. The impact of the oil crisis and global inflation and recession made it virtually impossible to maintain a favorable balance of trade. India was unable to match the increased cost of its imports with its substantially increased exports. Over the years, its trade deficit, its need of capital to finance continued industrialization, and its periodic food shortages forced India to rely heavily on foreign loans. In the 1950s and 1960s, India received huge shipments of food grains, mainly from the United States. After that time, however, India needed less food relief, and, in fact, it became a net exporter of food in the early 1980s. After U.S. developmental aid was terminated in 1971, the Soviet Union became India's primary source of foreign aid. India also received substantial amounts of developmental aid and assistance from other sources, such as Japan, the World Bank, and the Asian Bank.
Political stability is a very important asset for developing nations, and this was one asset India generally possessed. The nation retained a functioning parliamentary system, an institution inherited from the British. It also had prolonged rule by one dominant party—the Congress Party—and continuity of leadership in the persons of Jawaharlal Nehru, who ruled from independence (1947) until his death in 1964; his daughter, Indira Gandhi, who ruled (except for one brief interlude) from 1966 to 1984; and her son, Rajiv Gandhi, who ruled until 1989.
The Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia    387
Political stability in a country with widespread poverty and ethnic diversity was quite a feat. After gaining independence, India's leaders were confronted with the monumental task of binding together in nationhood the numerous subgroups of diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds. They pacified, for example, the separatist movement of the Dravidian language-speaking peoples of southern India. The mid-1980s, however, witnessed considerable violence between Hindus and Sikhs, a large religious minority group in northern India that launched a separatist movement. The secessionist cause was dramatized by the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in October 1984 by Sikhs, who then suffered bloody retaliation at the hands of angry Hindu mobs.
■   INDIA, PAKISTAN, AND BANGLADESH
India's foreign relations were not peaceful, despite the "live and let live" neutralist policy proclaimed by Prime Minister Nehru in the 1950s. Nehru's efforts to exert the moral influence of India as a neutral peacemaker in the early Cold War years were noteworthy and gained him considerable international prestige, but they did little to help the country in its troubled relations with its neighbors. India's conflicts with Pakistan and China served to undermine its neutralist diplomacy and necessitated large military expenditures that drained its meager resources.
Indian-Pakistani relations were strained from the time of partition and became rapidly worse as the two countries feuded over disputed territory. Both countries claimed the remote mountainous state of Kashmir. In both 1948 and 1949, despite UN efforts to keep peace, Indian and Pakistani forces clashed over this issue. India managed to secure control of Kashmir and turned a deaf ear to Pakistan's continual demands for a plebiscite there. The Pakistani claim to sparsely populated Kashmir was based on the fact that the majority of its people were Muslim, which explains why Pakistan wished to settle the matter with a plebiscite. India's claim rested mainly on the expressed will of the local ruler of Kashmir to remain within India.
India was confronted by a more formidable foe in Communist China over still another territorial dispute in the Himalayas. Both China and India laid claim to the southern slopes of the Himalayan Mountains north of the Assam plain, each staking its claim on different boundaries drawn by nineteenth-century British surveyors in this remote mountainous area. India took the position that its claim was non-negotiable and turned down repeated diplomatic efforts by Beijing to settle the issue. In 1962, India's forces suffered a humiliating defeat by China in a brief border war.
While India was still recovering from this setback, and not long after the death of its highly revered ruler, Prime Minister Nehru, Pakistan
388    The Third World
decided to seek a military solution to the Kashmiri issue. Tensions mounted as skirmishes along the disputed border occurred with increasing frequency. Pakistan's forces then crossed the cease-fire line in August 1965, and the conflict quickly escalated into a brief but fierce war. India rallied to defeat the Pakistanis. Both sides had been fortified with modern weapons purchased mainly from the United States. U.S.-built jet fighters battled each other—some bearing Pakistani insignia and flown by Pakistani pilots, the others bearing Indian insignia and flown by Indian pilots.
At this point, Indian-Pakistani conflicts began to take on important global dimensions, because both sides had lined up the support of the superpowers. India rebuked the United States for supplying arms to its enemy. (The United States had been selling modern weapons to Pakistan since 1954 under terms of the Baghdad Pact, and it increased its military aid to Pakistan after the 1965 war.) Consequently, India increasingly turned to the Soviet Union, which was only too willing to provide support to a new client and extend its influence in the region. Pakistan, meanwhile, found another friend, the People's Republic of China (PRC). Ironically, the supporters of Pakistan—the United States and the PRC—were bitter Cold War foes during these years.
Before turning to the next round of conflict, we need to note Pakistan's progress and problems. During the 1960s, Pakistan was worse off than India in terms of economic development, overpopulation, and poverty. Much of what we have said about India's plight and the causes for its problems generally applied to Pakistan as well. But Pakistan was beset by additional problems stemming from its peculiar situation as a nation with two separate parts. West Pakistan, where the capital was located, was separated from East Pakistan by nearly 1,000 miles of Indian territory. The distance between the two parts was even greater culturally and politically. The people of East Pakistan are Bengalis who, except for their Muslim religion, had little in common with the West Pakistanis, who are made up of several ethnic groups—the largest of which is the Punjabi.
The two parts of Pakistan were unbalanced politically in favor of West Pakistan, which produced a sense of grievance in East Pakistan. Political and military power was concentrated in the West, despite the fact that the more densely populated East contained over half of the nation's population. Constitutionally, East Pakistan comprised only one of the nation's five provinces and thus had only 20 percent of the seats in the Pakistani parliament. Moreover, only about 35 percent of the national budget was earmarked for East Pakistan. The Bengalis also argued that East Pakistan was treated as a captive market for West Pakistan. For these reasons, the Bengalis in overcrowded East Pakistan felt victimized by their own government.
Bengali frustration mounted until it erupted in late 1970, when East-Pakistan was hit first by a terrible natural catastrophe and then by a man-'1 made disaster. In November of that year, a powerful cyclone was followed
The Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia    389
by an enormous tidal wave and widespread flooding, leaving approximately 200,000 people dead and 1 million homeless. The lack of effective government relief measures provided irate Bengalis with further evidence of their government's indifference toward the problems of East Pakistan, thus feeding the flames of Bengali separatism. While still suffering the prolonged effects of the flooding, East Pakistan fell victim to a disaster of an entirely different kind: an assault by the military forces of West Pakistan.
The military regime of Gen. Yahya Khan had called for an election in December 1970 for a National Assembly to draft a new constitution for Pakistan and thus end thirteen years of military rule. In the election, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the Bengali leader and head of the Awami League—a political party that stood for elevating the status of East Pakistan—won a large majority. General Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, head of the leading West Pakistan-based party, were shocked by the election results and conspired to block the scheduled convening of the National Assembly. Consequently, the Bengalis of East Pakistan began to stir, but their protest demonstrations were met with a military crackdown and the imposition of martial law. Sheikh Mujibur, who was solidly supported by the Bengali people, met with General Khan and Bhutto in an attempt to resolve the political crisis, but he refused to yield to their demands. As a showdown approached in March 1971, General Khan unleashed a military attack on East Pakistan, striking first at the leaders of the Áwami League and placing Mujibur under arrest. Thus began the bloody suppression of the Bengali people in which, ultimately, some 3 million people of East Pakistan met their deaths at the hands of a Pakistani army of 70,000 troops. This indiscriminate brutality, in turn, caused more violent resistance by the Bengalis, who now demanded independence. Meanwhile, around 10 million of the terrorized Bengali people began fleeing their ravaged homeland and crossed the borders into India.
The military assault on East Pakistan was met by Bengali armed resistance, mainly in the form of guerrilla warfare, and the conflict soon escalated into a full-fledged civil war. In December 1971, India entered the fray and, after two weeks of intensive combat, forced Pakistan's surrender in the East. India had seized an opportunity to deliver a blow to its longtime foe by intervening on the side of the Bengalis, whose cause for independence the Indian government supported. The result, after nine months of bitter struggle and approximately half a million casualties (on all sides), was another victory for India over Pakistan and the birth of a new nation: Bangladesh.
This South Asian struggle, like most wars in the Third World, had an important Cold War dimension. The United States felt obliged to stick by its ally, Pakistan, despite the latter's widely reported brutality; therefore, the United States opposed the independence movement that created Bangladesh. During the war, Washington had denounced India for its aggression
The Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia    391
and terminated economic aid to India. This fact combined with PRC support of Pakistan caused India to strengthen its ties with the Soviet Union, with which India signed a twenty-year pact of friendship in August 1971. In effect, the United States had lost ground to its Soviet adversary in a regional Cold War battle. The United States delayed recognizing the new state of Bangladesh until May 1972 and delayed for almost as long sending shipments of economic aid, which Bangladesh desperately needed. For its part, the PRC withheld recognition of the new nation until 1975 and continually vetoed Bangladesh's efforts to gain admission to the United Nations.
The impact of the 1971 war was even more profound on the nations directly involved. India's victory was more decisive than victories in previous wars with Pakistan, and its national security was greatly enhanced by the severity of Pakistan's loss, as well as by India's new ties with the Soviet Union. Within India, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's popularity was strengthened immensely by the country's success in this war, and this served her well in upcoming elections.
For Pakistan, the 1971 war had a sobering effect. Now limited to what had been West Pakistan and with a population reduced by more than half, Pakistan turned to the tasks of rehabilitation and reorganization. Military government was ended when Gen. Yahya Khan resigned and transferred power to Bhutto, whose Pakistan People's Party had come in second in the December 1970 election. One of Bhutto's first acts was to release Sheikh Mujibur from prison and arrange his return to Bangladesh, where he was to become president of the new country. Bhutto also saw the wisdom of. reducing tensions in his country's relations with India, and for that purpose he agreed to meet with Indira Gandhi in 1972. Indian-Pakistani relations were substantially improved through the diplomacy of the two leaders, at least until May 1974, when India successfully tested a nuclear device. By demonstrating its nuclear capacity, India established even more conclusively its position as the dominant power in South Asia, but at the same time it aroused Pakistani fears.
Bangladesh, born of disaster, learned that independence produced no miracles. After the war, India ordered the return of the 10 million refugees; when they began pouring back into their ravaged homeland, they found little that could support them. The catastrophic flood damage and war destruction had left the country devastated and unable to cope with the continuing wave of starvation, disease, and death that followed. Mujibur's government confronted not only a destitute people but also crime, corruption, and general disorder. The government declared a state of emergency in 1974, and in 1975 the once popular Mujibur was killed in a military coup. In the years that followed, political instability was prolonged by feuds between military factions contending for power.
The grinding poverty of this overpopulated land seemed beyond remedy. No larger than the state of Georgia, Bangladesh was the homeland of
392    The Third World
over 90 million people (118 million by 1994, with a per capita GNP of $220). There was simply too little land to support the swollen population. About 90 percent of the people lived in the countryside, and about half owned less than an acre of land—an amount insufficient to feed the average household of six. To make matters worse, the monsoons dump such heavy amounts of rain on this delta country that it is virtually impossible to farm the flooded land for about four months of the year. And at times, the land is hit by cyclones, whose winds and torrential rains cause flooding and enormous death and destruction. Floods and famine, year after dismal year, appear to be the fate of Bangladesh. It is little wonder that many of the desperate people of Bangladesh fled their harsh homeland in quest of a more secure life in neighboring India.But India was also overpopu-lated, especially in the state of Assam bordering Bangladesh, and could not support the unwanted refugees.
■    SOUTH ASIA SINCE 1980
D   India
The 1980s brought to the Indian subcontinent a measure of economic growth and a slight improvement in the standard of living. In both India and Pakistan, one could witness the steady growth of industry, increased urban construction, greater agricultural output, and the expansion of the middle class. Yet, because of continued population growth, both countries remained among the poorest in the world in terms of per capita GNP, which in 1994 was $320 for India and $430 for Pakistan. The abysmal poverty of peasant villagers and many city dwellers remained unaffected by economic growth. Both countries needed to control their population growth rates, which threatened their economic futures. Family planning programs in past years had witnessed scant success. As a result, family planners were hoping for a feminist revolt against the grain of societies dominated by men.5
Soon after coming to power in 1984, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi nudged his country away from the system of state economic planning established over three decades earlier by his grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru. The new policy meant a freer market, the growth of light industry, and the growth of the middle class. A new consumerism contributed to the slight but sustained rise in the nation's economic growth rate, which during the 1980-1992 period averaged about 3 percent annually. Yet, India was still beset by persistent problems, such as a gross maldistribution of wealth and an equally disproportionate distribution of land. More than 300 million people—over one-third of the population—still lived below the
The Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia    393
Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, former pilot who succeeded his mother, Indira Gandhi, as prime minister in Oct. 1984. (Embassy of India)
poverty line. Wealthy landowners did not farm their land intensively, and because no thorough land reform was attempted, the productive potential of the countryside was not fully realized.
Another problem was the separatist movement of the Sikhs in the northern state of Punjab and the repressive measures Indira and Rajiv Gandhi used in response to that movement. The Sikhs, whose religion is a mixture of Hinduism and Islam, made up about 2 percent of India's population, but they constituted the majority in Punjab. The brutal raid by government security forces on the Sikhs' Golden Temple in Amritsar in June 1984 left 1,200 dead and as many taken prisoner. The Sikhs became unrelenting in their demand for an independent state—to be called Khalistan— and the Indian police became overzealous in their effort to ferret out Sikh militants, sometimes taking the law into their own hands by torturing and even murdering suspects. Thousands of Sikhs became political prisoners held with neither charges nor trials. An immediate consequence of these events was the assassination of Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards and the subsequent massacre of an estimated 1,000 Sikhs by Hindus. Rajiv Gandhi, who succeeded his mother, continued to deal with the Sikhs with a heavy hand. In May 1987, after four months of escalated violence during which over 500 Sikhs were killed by security officers, Gandhi imposed direct federal rule over Punjab and ousted the elected state government of the Sikh moderates.
In November 1989, the Congress Party was narrowly defeated in the parliamentary election, and Rajiv Gandhi resigned as prime minister. He was succeeded by V. P. Singh, an experienced politician who ran his campaign
394    The Third World
as a populist crusade against the arrogance and corruption of Gandhi's government. Singh's experience as finance minister in Gandhi's cabinet in the mid-1980s augured well for continued economic growth under his rule, but the fragile coalition on which his administration was based limited his power. Singh's government proved too weak to deal effectively with either India's faltering economy or its divisive religious disputes. He was succeeded as prime minister in October 1990 by Chandra Shekhar, a rival in the same party, but Shekhar's government was no stronger. It was dependent on the tacit support of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, whose Congress Party controlled the lower house. Gandhi cajoled Shekhar into resigning in March 1991, and parliament called for new elections.
On May 21, 1991, while campaigning, Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, the victim of a terrorist bomb attack. The attack was indicative of ethnic strife in India, for Gandhi was killed by members of the Tamil Liberation Tigers who felt Gandhi had betrayed them in their war for independence against the Singhalese majority in the island nation of Sri Lanka. Initially, Gandhi had intervened on behalf of the Tamil minority, but he later backed away because he became uncomfortable supporting a secessionist movement. He died as his mother had, the victim of an ethnic movement seeking independence.
From the ranks of the Congress Party, which won the parliamentary election, P. V. Narasimha Rao, an elderly veteran politician, was selected to form a cabinet to govern India—a nation in shock and in great need of effective leadership. Prime Minister Rao crafted an economic reform program aimed at stimulating India's slumping economy. India had limited options; it was burdened with a foreign debt of $71 billion and dwindling foreign reserves. Moreover, India could no longer count on the Soviet Union for support, as the latter itself was disintegrating at that time (1991). It became necessary to abandon India's centrally planned economy to open the country to foreign investment and provide incentives for private business and technological development. The first step was to reverse India's balance of payments crisis by securing emergency loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Rao slashed government spending and red tape, cut import duties, invited foreign investment, and loosened interest rates to encourage private business and increase exports.
The economy showed signs of responding to Rao's reforms, but no economic miracle was in the making. The dead weight of India's economic structure and its bureaucracy continued to impede rapid restructuring, and foreign investors did not rush to India's rescue. By mid-1992—a full year after the reform program was instituted—the momentum of Rao's reform program was spent, and India was still struggling to modernize its mori- š bund economy.                                                                                           j
The Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia    395
To make matters worse, in December 1992 India suffered a renewal of religious violence. Fighting between Hindus and Muslims erupted in Ayo-dhya when Hindu zealots tore down a Muslim mosque built in 1528 at the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram. This was the first time Hindus had razed a mosque since the 1947 partition. The violence spread to numerous Indian cities.6 Before order was restored, the casualty toll reached over 1,200 dead and 4,600 wounded in the worst Hindu-Muslim clashes since 1947. The destruction of the mosque and the ensuing attacks on Indian Muslims provoked anti-Indian protests in Pakistan and many other Islamic nations.
Rao's government continued to limp along in the 1990s until it was upended in the general election of May 1996. His administration and the Congress Party had become stagnant and unresponsive, and his reforms had failed to improve the lives of the rural poor; nor was he able to curb corruption and cabinet infighting. The election, which was the most indecisive in India's history, clearly reflected the country's diversity and political polarization. Voters turned to parties on both the right and the left. On the right was the Hindu extremist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which won the most seats; on the left was the National Front-Left Front alliance (led by the Communist Party). The BJP, headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, stood for making India a Hindu state and curbing the rights of India's Muslims and other religious minorities. Vajpayee and his party also advocated restricting foreign investment, maintaining a tougher line against Pakistan, and declaring openly that India possessed a nuclear arsenal—something all previous Indian governments had refused to do. A BJP cabinet would surely mean a break with the political tradition established by early Congress Party leaders—Gandhi and Nehru—which held that India mušt remain a secular state tolerant of religious and ethnic diversity.
The BJP's margin of victory in the election was not large enough for it to form its own cabinet, and both the Congress Party and the leftist alliance refused to enter into a coalition with the BJP, viewing it as anathema. The political deadlock was broken when Vajpayee was finally able to form a cabinet, but it lasted only twelve days before it was forced to resign by a vote of no confidence. A little-known politician, H. D. Dewe Gowda, leader of one of the parties in a newly formed "United Front," was named prime minister of a coalition cabinet. Gowda's cabinet relied on the support of the Congress Party, now in a kingmaker role—support that was promised only as long as Gowda retained Rao's economic reform program.
D   Pakistan
Pakistan, too, witnessed swings of the political pendulum in the late 1980s and the 1990s. Until 1988, it remained under the rule of military strongman Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq. Zia disregarded critics who called for a
396    The Third World
return to civilian rule, citing the national emergency caused by the ongoing war in Afghanistan on Pakistan's western border. The influx of thousands of refugees from that war-ravaged country strained the economy and threatened internal security. Zia also pointed to the persistent threat of Indian aggression, which remained a Pakistani obsession.
Military rule ended abruptly in August 1988, however, when General Zia died in an airplane explosion—an apparent assassination—and parliamentary elections were held in November to return the country to civilian rule. The result of those elections was a stunning victory for Benazir Bhutto as the new prime minister. The thirty-five-year-old Bhutto became the first female head of government of a predominantly Muslim nation. She was the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan's last civilian ruler, who had been deposed in 1974 and executed in 1979 by the same General Zia she now succeeded. After returning from extended exile early in 1988, the British-educated Bhutto had led a national movement against Zia.
Bhutto's grip on power was tenuous from the beginning because she had only a slight parliamentary plurality and the opposition parties, the military, and the conservative clergy were watchful lest she make a slip. Her task was nothing less than ruling a nation beset with all the problems of the Third World and at the same time satisfying its military leaders, who remained distrustful of her efforts to govern without them. Bhutto endeavored to steer a careful course between delivering promised increases in social spending and implementing an austerity program required by international lending agencies for desperately needed loans. During her first year in power, Bhutto's government played a key role in negotiating the terms by which the Soviet military withdrew from neighboring Afghanistan while officially maintaining Pakistani support for Afghan rebels based in Pakistan.
Although Bhutto appeared on Pakistan's political scene like an angel of democracy and enjoyed popular support among younger Pakistanis, she was confronted by formidable political foes. Military leaders were suspicious of her appeal to the masses and were eager to find a pretext for her removal, lest she become too popular. Corruption and ethnic violence, although not new to Pakistan, proved cause enough to overthrow Bhutto in August 1990. She was charged with misconduct and abuse of power, but the attack on her was focused mainly on her husband, a businessman accused of using his wife's office for illegal financial gain. The real force behind her demise was Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, who resented Bhutto's attempts to rein in the military. Since she represented an effort to establish a democratic tradition and improve relations with India, Bhutto's loss was Pakistan's loss.
An interim government was formed until the parliamentary elections in October 1990. The winner of the elections was Nawaz Sharif, who immediately set out to make good on his campaign pledge to establish an Is-; lamic state in which the Koran became the supreme law and all aspects of
The Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia    397
life were subjected to its ultimate authority. Sharif's government, however, was ineffective in dealing with endemic corruption, recurrent violence (such as kidnapping for ransom), a mounting foreign debt, and worsening relations with India. Moreover, Pakistan suffered a major diplomatic and economic setback when the United States withdrew an annual $500 million in aid in protest of Pakistan's development of nuclear weapons. Military interference continued. The deployment of the army in the southern province of Sindh to restore order in June 1992 raised the prospect of another military takeover.
Meanwhile, Benazir Bhutto was again waiting in the wings. In November 1992, she planned a mass demonstration in the capital to demand Sharif's resignation but was blocked by police and expelled from the capital. When elections were held in 1993, however, Bhutto narrowly defeated Sharif in a bitter contest. As had been true during her previous stint as prime minister, Bhutto's government was shaky, largely because of her precarious relations with the nation's military leaders. Although she defended Pakistan's position on the two key foreign policy issues (the territorial dispute over Kashmir and Pakistan's development of nuclear weapons), Bhutto, unlike the military and her predecessor, showed signs of diplomatic flexibility. But her position was made more difficult when opposition party leader Sharif declared publicly in August 1994 that Pakistan had produced nuclear weapons and even threatened their use against India in another war over Kashmir. In doing so, Sharif broke Pakistan's long-held silence regarding its nuclear capability and inflamed relations with India and with the United States—its erstwhile ally—which had long sought to dissuade Pakistan from building the bomb.
By October 1996, Bhutto had again lost favor and was forced to resign. Corruption was so rampant in her regime that even her vehement denials, her personal charisma, and the power of her family name were insufficient to save her from the wrath of her political opponents and the general public.
■   ASSOCIATION OF
SOUTHEAST ASIAN NATIONS
Southeast Asia, the region stretching from Burma in the west to the island countries of Indonesia and the Philippines in the east, was made up of nations that emerged from colonialism in the 1950s. Each faced a host of problems common to Third World nations, particularly the lack of economic development. The struggle for independence had fostered nationalism, which, on the one hand, abetted the nation-building cause and, on the other, created contention among ethnic minorities within nations and animosity among the nations in the region. Moreover, the region was made insecure by the continuing Cold War struggle at the center of the region