Mapuche

millisphere (noun): A discrete region of approximately 1000th of the total world population – a bit over 7 million people but anywhere between 3.5 million and 14 million will do. A lens through which to examine human geography.

We have been Wwoof hosts (willing workers on organic farms) since 1976, and over the years we’ve hosted young travellers from all over the world.

Last year we had our first South Americans – from Chile.

Danielle was a young vintner from Santiago working the season in New Zealand vineyards and Jose was a recent English language graduate from southern Chile, and I took the opportunity to quiz them about Jose’s millisphere of Mapuche.

Relative to the rest of the world, South America is characterised by large rural millispheres, indicating low population density; and a number of very large cities where South Americans tend to congregate.

Eighty per cent of the indigenous people of southern South America are Mapuche who remained independent for the first 350 years of European settlement until the Arauco war in Chile and the “Conquest of the Desert” in Argentina around 1870 brought them under state control.

There have been Mapuche settlements in Chile and Argentina since 500 BC and there is evidence that the Fuegians reached the Falkland and South Shetland Islands by canoe.

At the southern tip of South America, the island of Tierra del Fuego is divided east/west by the boundary between Chile and Argentina. This boundary continues up the continent following the watershed of the Andes. Chile drains west into the Pacific and Argentina east into the Atlantic.

It takes most of the land south of the major cities of Santiago (7.3 million) in Chile and Buenos Aires (13.5 million) in Argentina to make up enough people for a millisphere.

Most of the people cling to the coast; the rest of southern South America is too cold and too dry to support much life.

Both Danielle and Jose were “Mestizos” (of mixed European and Amerindian blood).

University of Chile figures reveal that the Chilean population is around 30 per cent Caucasian, 65 per cent Mestizos and 5 per cent indigenous. The “average” Chilean gene is 60 per cent European and 40 per cent Amerindian.

Argentina was originally majority Mestizo until mass European immigration in the 19th century.

Of the two million Mapuche, most live in the Araucania region of southern Chile where Jose was from. Although Jose was a Mestizo, he certainly didn’t consider himself Mapuche. In 2002 only 4.3 per cent of Chileans identified as Mapuche; by 2016 this had risen to 11.4 per cent, and there are about 200,000 remaining Mapuche language speakers.

Ever since the Chilean army invaded Mapuche territory in the late 1800s, Mapuche relations with the state have remained fractious.

The conflict has accelerated in recent years with armed groups burning houses, churches, trucks and forest plantations. Forestry is Chile’s second highest export earner after mining.

Only 36 per cent of Chileans believe that Mapuche feel they are “Chilean”.

Under the military administration of General Augusto Pinochet (1970-73), remaining Mapuche land-holdings were reduced from 10 million to 400,000 acres when the state acquired land for forestry (mostly Pinus radiata for export to the United States).

Pinochet introduced anti-terrorism laws which are still applied to Mapuche resistance – and 60 per cent of Chileans believe terrorism exists in the Araucaria region.

Chile is in the grip of a 10-year drought, experiencing historically high temperatures and about a million acres of forest, valued at US$333 million ($464m), were destroyed by fire last summer, most being attributed to accidental causes.

This year’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day (Dia de la Raza), held on the day that Christopher Columbus made landfall in the Americas, was marked by marches in Santiago calling for Mapuche judicial autonomy, return of their ancestral lands and the re-establishment of Mapuche cultural identity.

Both Danielle and Jose acknowledged that “indigenous things have less value” in Chile and that Chileans were prejudiced against Mapuche – prejudice highest among the old, the poor and the right-wing, they told me.

The violence between Mestizo landowners and Chile’s indigenous people was getting worse, they thought, and that “both sides are victims of the ongoing processes of globalisation”.

When Fred Frederikse is not building, he is a self-directed student of geography and traveller, and in his spare time he is the co-chair of the Whanganui Musicians’ Club.

Catalonia

millisphere (noun): A discrete region of roughly one 1000th of the total world population – a bit over seven million people. A lens through which to examine human geography.

The state-aborted referendum on independence in Catalonia (population 7.5 million) puts the spotlight on yet another millisphere seeking to extract itself from the state it is part of.

It was in Catalonia that I forgave the Spanish gypsies …

In Andalusia, my travel companion had lost her plane-ticket and the contents of her purse to lightning-fast gypsy fingers. After that we went on alert whenever we ran into gypsies, but a few live performances by gypsy street musicians softened my heart.

In front of Antonio Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, a gypsy woman with a baby on her hip was working a queue of tourists. We were leaving Spain, so I emptied my accumulated small change into her proffered McDonald’s carton. She returned the gesture with a high five – it felt like a blessing.

Catalonia – in the northeast corner of Spain and on the border with France – was incorporated into the Spanish empire in 1516 in the “dynastic union” of Castile and Aragon/Catalonia under emperor Charles V.

In the 17th century, Catalonia briefly revolted against Spain, siding with France in the Franco-Spanish war, and retained a degree of autonomy until 1716, when the Nuevo Plata decree abolished Catalan institutions.

By the 19th century, when Spain started losing its New World colonies and had to look for new income streams, it was Catalonia that led Spanish industrialisation. In the early 20th century, Catalan anarchist activists achieved the first eight-hour working day in Europe.

Franco’s fascist government put down the anarchists, banned any activities associated with Catalan nationalism and banned the use of the Catalan language, which is a Romance language somewhere between Spanish, French and Italian.

After Franco’s death in 1975, the Generalitat (regional government) was restored. In 1978 the Catalan Generalitat was granted control over culture, environment, communication, transport, public safety and local government. The Generalitat shares health, justice and education with Madrid.

In 2006 the Catalan Generalitat passed the “Statute of Autonomy” but it was declared “non-valid” by Spain’s constitutional court. When the Generalitat banned bullfighting, the constitutional court overturned it, ruling that bullfighting was a Spanish cultural tradition.
Madrid retains control over ports, airports, coasts, international borders, passports and ID, immigration, arms control and terrorism prevention.

Catalonia has its own police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, and the national police, the feared Guardia Civil who maintained political control in Franco’s time but were rarely seen in Catalonia … thousands of them were sent in to stop the Catalan independence referendum.

Catalonia is pretty evenly split between those seeking independence and those wanting to stay with Spain but they all agreed with having a referendum.

“If Scotland can have an independence referendum, why can’t we?” they all said.

“Occupation forces out,” they shouted when the Guardia Civil occupied the polling stations; and “No tine por” (“We are not afraid”), which is what the crowds in Barcelona chanted after the Islamist van attack on Las Ramblas last month.

My friend Johnny Keating was in Barcelona in the lead-up to the referendum last week.
Coming into the city from the north with his travel companion Sue behind him on a motorbike, he said the landscape was flat, hot and dry and the “ladies of the night”, sitting under red sun umbrellas and pointing their long legs out at the passing traffic, were a bit distracting.

Johnny said the locals were “pissed off” with the presence of the Guardia Civil in the free-spirited city that had given the world Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. Johnny thought the European Union should be mediating.

The composer of the hymn of the United Nations, the Catalan cellist Pablo Casals, who is considered the pre-eminent cellist of the 20th century, said: “The love of one’s country is a splendid thing. But why should should love stop at the border? There is a brotherhood among all men.”

Traditionally Catalans follow their own “Seny” philosophy (called “the wisdom of sensibleness”) – that, their language and banning bullfighting make Barcelona different from Madrid.

When Fred Frederikse is not building, he is a self-directed student of geography and traveller, and in his spare time he is the co-chair of the Whanganui Musicians’ Club.

Iraqi Kurdistan

Kurdistan

Aspirant millispheres (discrete regions of approximately one thousandth of the total world population) have been coming thick and fast lately. Kurdistan, the semi-autonomous Kurdish region (8.4 million) in  northern Iraq and Catalonia (7.5 million) in Spain have both had referenda in the last month about forming independent states.

On the 25th of September 2017 Iraq’s Kurdistan regional government asked voters: “Do you want the Kurdistan region to become an independent state?” – 93% percent of those who voted said: “Yes.”

At the end of the World War I, the Ottoman Empire was divided up by the victors at the Treaty of Lausanne, roughly into the countries we see today in the Middle East. The Kurds were initially promised their own country but today’s 40 million Kurds are distributed along the mountainous borders between Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran.

“We have no friends but the mountains,” say the Kurds and (with the exception of Israel) this remains mostly true today. Iraq’s reaction to the referendum was to impose a land and air blockade and to threaten military action. In the 1980s 180,000 Kurdish “infidels” were killed by Saddam Hussein’s Baathist Arab government – this included the infamous 1988 Halabja poison gas attack on civilians.

Turkey warned of military measures, cancelled flights and called the referendum “treachery.”

One in five Turkish citizens are Kurdish. Ankara refers to their country’s Kurds as “Mountain Turks” and has actively suppressed the Kurdish language and culture. 40,000 Kurds have been killed by the Turkish forces maintaining control in southeast Turkey.

Ten percent of Syrians are Kurdish and Syria also has a semi-autonomous Kurdish region (Rojava in northeast Syria). Syria rejects the “unilateral” call for independence by Iraq’s Kurds and says it cannot accept the division of Iraq – fearing a similar division in Syria.

The Kurds are largely Sunni Muslim but there are also Yazidi, Zoroastrian, Christian and Jewish Kurds and schools in Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous region are “religiously neutral.”

It was the Kurdish Peshmerga who helped the Iraqi Army defeat ISIS in Mosul recently.

The fundamentalist Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam has failed to attract adherents among Sunni Kurds like it did with their Sunni Arab neighbours to the south. Kurds have also been active in defeating ISIS in Kobane in Syria.

Iraqi Kurds have only been able to secure a passport since 2005. Admittedly it is an Iraqi passport and about as difficult to travel with as a Somali or Afghan passport – but it is easier than traveling with no passport at all.

When the Iraqi army fled in the face of ISIS advances the Kurdish Peshmerga occupied the Kirkuk oil fields in 2014, resisting an ISIS takeover. Oil now flows by pipeline from Kurdistan to the Turkish port of Ceyhan in the Mediterranean.

Trade between Erbil and Ankara is estimated to be $US7.5 billion per year, with a similar volume of trade between Erbil and Tehran. The Kurds have set up free trade zones on both their Turkish and Iranian  borders. The per capita income in the Kurdish regional government area is 25% higher than in the rest of Iraq.

Kurdistan has four billion barrels of proven oil reserves and an estimated forty-five billion barrels of unproven reserves. Exxon has recently defied Baghdad and signed exploration agreements with Kurdistan, walking away from its southern Iraq oil fields.

Based on the region’s history one would need a heart of stone to oppose Kurdistan independence but at present Russia, China, the European Union, the United States and the

United Nations are all against it. The United States government says that independence for Kurdistan risks destabilising Iraq.

Iran has called Kurdistan’s president Massoud Barzani a “middleman for the Zionists.” Chuck Schumer the Jewish Democrat senator for New York said: “neighbouring states, led by despots, who oppose the Kurdish state out of self-interest need to have respect for the Kurds to determine their own future,” echoing the position taken by Israel; the one country to support independence for Kurdistan. There are 200,000 Jewish Kurds now living in Israel.

While Spain called the referendum illegal Artus Mas, the former president of Catalonia, said he supported Kurdistan’s bid for independence and applauded Kurdistan’s leadership for “defending democracy.”