[lbo-talk] Mahathir's Party Hands Out Anti-Semitic Books

[Grant Lee]

> Toss democracy into the fermenting
> brew, and the oppressed majority is emboldened to strike the rich few,
> particularly if they are an easily identified ethnic group. That's what
> occurred in the Philippines after the alliance between the ethnic Chinese
> and dictator Ferdinand Marcos was broken by Marcos' exile and the arrival
> of democracy. In Indonesia, the end of Suharto's dictatorship in 1998 saw
> the looting and burning of 5,000 shops and houses of ethnic Chinese in
> Jakarta. The Lebanese in West Africa, Asian Indians in East Africa, Jews
in
> Russia, and whites in Zimbabwe have all suffered after democratic rule
> arrived.


> No two countries are precisely the same, of course. But it's remarkable
how
> many developing nations are affected by the perilous mixture the author
> describes. In Nigeria--a free-market country that is constantly experi-
> menting with (and failing at) democratic rule--tens of thousands of the
> indigenous Ibo tribe have been slaughtered by their poorer but more
> numerous tribal rivals. In Rwanda, the Tutsi tribe held the political and
> economic reins until far-more-numerous Hutus murdered hundreds of
thousands

 > The pattern of market-dominant ethnic minorities holds true in much of
> South America as well as in Southeast Asia, Africa, the former Yugoslavia,
> and Russia

Yes. To those examples can be added the recent case of ethnic Indians in
Fiji. Two Indo-Fijian PMs have been deposed by nativists in military coups
(1987 & 1999). As far as I'm aware, there haven't been any massacres yet. If
there is worsening violence, I don't like the chances of the Indo-Fijians as
asylum seekers in Australia, NZ and further afield, given the growing
antipathy to refugees in the western world.

(cf) Scott MacWilliam, 2002, "Poverty, corruption & governance in Fiji"

http://peb.anu.edu.au/pdf/PEB17-1macwilliam.pdf