[sacw] [ACT] sacw dispatch #1 (23 March 00)

Harsh Kapoor aiindex@mnet.fr
Thu, 23 Mar 2000 11:10:26 +0100


South Asia Citizens Web Dispatch
23 March 2000
_________________________
#1. Pride and Blood in Kashmir
#2. Pakistan: Labour Party Leaders Houses Raided
#3. Indian women for goodwill trip on Lahore bus
#4. The RSS / India : Hindu's / "Anti Hindu's"
#5. The New Right in Europe (An article on Austria)
_________________________

#1.

New York Times
March 22, 2000

Pride and Blood in Kashmir

By PANKAJ MISHRA

There were horrifying scenes all around on Tuesday when I reached
Chattinsinghpura, the village in Indian-held Kashmir where, the night
before, more than 35 Sikh men had been killed, allegedly by Muslim
separatists. In the courtyard of the local gurudwara (the Sikh prayer
site), the dead men were being brought in on ladders improvised as
stretchers. Covered in bright blankets, the corpses dripped blood on the
muddy ground. Placed on thin rugs, the bodies were immediately
surrounded by relatives, mostly women hysterical with grief and despair,
their long hair loose, their bangles broken.

The local journalists I came with had seen worse things in the valley,
and they were back to their bantering selves after the first few subdued
minutes. But my own reaction surprised me: for someone who had never
witnessed such a grisly event, I felt grief, even fear, but strangely
little shock. There seemed something too familiar in the scene before
me: the remote village, the corpses on the ground, the wailing widows
and, in the background, the snow-capped mountains where the murderers
lurked unseen.

To anyone who has lived in India for the past two decades, such scenes
have become almost commonplace after two prolonged separatist conflicts
in Kashmir and the Punjab, quickly spread across India by the numerous
TV channels created by India's globalized economy.

But the news media, which are deeply nationalistic, are much less likely
to report violence inflicted by the Indian state in Kashmir. The one-
sidedness cannot but have disturbing consequences in a poor,
semiliterate country where national greatness has become dangerously
confused with nuclear bombs and military strength, where rivalries of
class, caste, region and religion have enfeebled democratic institutions
in recent years.

Not surprisingly, regular exposure to extreme violence has hardened
Indian attitudes, and brutality is now increasingly met by brutality.
The hard-line stance of the present government, dominated by Hindu
nationalists, perfectly represents the wishes of the middle class,
which, while more and more affluent, is still without an intellectual
and cultural life of its own and seeks an identity in the form of
aggressive nationalism -- just as the fractious political establishment
in Pakistan strives to hold itself together by supporting the anti-India
insurgency in Kashmir.

At the massacre site in Kashmir, I met a middle-level officer from
Border Security Force, a paramilitary organization fighting the Muslim
insurgency. He was a Kashmiri Hindu, and he wasn't worried at the
prospect of large numbers of Sikhs fleeing Kashmir in the way the Hindus
had done after becoming the targets of Muslim separatists.

"Isolate the Muslims in Kashmir," he said, "and then we'll be free to
deal with them."

He thought that all Kashmiri Muslims fighting for autonomy were traitors
and that Pakistan's henchmen deserved no mercy. In the six years he has
lived in Kashmir, he claimed, he hasn't let any separatist he has
captured go alive.

"I don't believe in this human rights nonsense," he said. "Do you want
us to fight Pakistan with one hand tied behind our back?"

This general view echoed a very popular solution to the Kashmir problem.
The military arms of all-powerful political authorities in New Delhi
have been used to suppress regional discontent.

=46ew people seem bothered that this crackdown undermines the very
foundations -- democracy and secularism -- of the Indian state. The
impulse toward regional autonomy is always identified with secessionism,
as a Pakistan-fomented plot to break up India. The presence of an
unstable and fundamentally hostile neighbor further deepens the Indian
sense of being under siege, and pushes the country, in Kashmir at least,
into what looks like an endless cycle of violence.

At a town in north Kashmir, I met young Muslim men who said his shops
and houses had been burned down by a policeman angered that separatists
had killed a local officer. A week later, separatists launched a grenade
and rocket attack on the local police station. Almost every Muslim you
meet in Kashmir, even people with relatives and jobs in India, claims to
have a story about torture, extortion or deaths at the hands of Indian
soldiers. Kashmiris say that separatism and local support for it are
made almost inevitable by the heavy-handedness of the Indian military in
Kashmir.

That's why it seems unlikely that India could solve the Kashmir problem
by defeating Pakistan-backed separatists or by getting the United States
to denounce Pakistan. For peace in Kashmir to become even a possibility,
India would have to renew its commitment to democracy and human rights,
which the middle class, with its support of Hindu nationalism, has no
time for at present.

Pankaj Mishra is the author of "The Romantics," a novel.

______

#2.

23 March 2000

Labour Party Leaders Houses Raided

Police and army men have raided the houses and the offices of Labour
party leaders last night on 22nd March. The raids have been carried
out after Labour Party Pakistan organized a demonstration in front of
American Consulate on 22nd March afternoon against the visit of
President Clinton. No arrest was made at time although there was
hundreds of policemen at the time. The main reason could be the large
presence of national and international media to cover the event.

After few hours, the police started raiding the different places to
arrest Farooq Tariq, Shoaib Bhatti and Zafar Awan, the three main
leaders of LPP. They were fortunate enough to avoid the arrests and
have since gone underground.

During the raid on Comrade Farooq Tariq house, hundreds of military
men and police force encircled the whole area. They entered the house
forcefully to search for Farooq despite protest from Shahnaz Iqbal,
partner of Comrade Farooq Tariq. She was alone with her 6 year old
doughtier. They then took one neighbourer Hamayun Rashid in custody
and forced him to point out the houses of all the Labour party members
in the area. Several houses of LPP comrades were raided in the area
but with no success. Hamanyon Rashid was then arrested for few hours
and was released 2 am early in the morning when several national
newspapers made inquires about the arrest.

Labour Party head quarters and the office of the Weekly Mazdoor
Jeddojuhd have been raided several times during last time and now are
under police surveillance. All the major newspapers have reported the
news of the demonstration and few could report about the raids as they
were carried out late night.

Labour Party leaders have gone underground and are in consultation
with their advocates. They have advised them not to be arrested until
they could move to the courts for bails and other remedies still
available.

The strong reaction came after LPP was able to organize a very
successful demonstration despite a ban on political activities. They
defied the ban and had announced it before hand in the national media.
LPP leaders had declared that they would not abide by the law, which
is in contradiction of basic human rights.

The raids have once again exposed the real nature of the regime. The
military rulers have tried to give a clean picture when Clinton
arrives in Pakistan on 25th March by forcing the political activists
to accept the military rule.

LPP organized the demo at the time when every single religious group
has welcomed the visit of American President on the pressure of the
military rulers. LPP will organize another meeting at Karachi Press
club on 24th March in collaboration with other Left parties and Trade
Unions against Clinton visit. Comrade Farooq Tariq was the main
speaker but would be unable to travel to this meeting because of the
present conditions. But the meeting will go ahead.

Human Rights Commission of Pakistan general secretary Hina Jelani have
condemned the raids and have declared to give full legal and other
support to Labour Party Pakistan.

report by Farooq Sulehria

______

#3.
News Today (http://www.india-today.com)
GENERAL
Posted March 22, 2000 =20

INDIAN WOMEN FOR GOODWILL TRIP ON LAHORE BUS

New Delhi, March 22: A 35-member women delegation including a few
members of Parliament, will travel on a goodwill trip to Pakistan by the
Delhi-Lahore bus on Saturday.

The participants, drawn from various women's organisations, include former
Rajya Sabha MP Nirmala Deshpande and former National Commission for Women
Chairperson Mohini Giri.

Organised by Women's Initiative for Peace in South Asia, a forum of
several women's organisations working for peace in the region, the trip
will include several meetings in Lahore and Islamabad, N. Vasudevan,
secretary of Rajghat Samadhi Committee, said.

Founded in 1999, the organisation had been engaged in working with several
groups for the cause of peace in South Asia.

______

#4.

Hindustan Times
<http://www.hindustantimes.com/>
Thursday, March 23, 2000, New Delhi
Opinion=20

Living with other=92 people
By T. K. Oommen

Recently, the
newly-appointed RSS Sarsanghchalak, K.S. Sudarshan, stated that India will
soon witness "an epic battle between the Hindu and anti-Hindu forces".

Sudarshan's "war cry" clearly divides the Indian nation-state along
religious lines. The RSS agenda of "Hinduising" Indian society is a part of
a process of homogenising national culture which openly challenges the
notion of cultural pluralism.

To fathom the ongoing contest between "cultural pluralism" and "cultural
nationalism", one must understand the tension between the nation-state and
religion and their struggle to establish supremacy. Religion and the
nation-state cannot be linked. A nationalism based on religion is not
tenable because whichever way one defines a nation, the concept of a
=93common homeland=94 is necessary for it to exist.

One cannot have a part of one=92s nation in Asia and the other part in
Africa or America. Separated sections become ethnic communities like the
Sindhis in India or they establish new nations in new =93homelands=94 the wa=
y
=46rench Canadians did. On the other hand, religious communities are always
territorially dispersed and have no common homeland.

This does not apply only to religions like Christianity, Islam and Sikhism
which have the concept of conversion at the core of their belief systems.
Geographical dispersion can also occur through migration or colonisation.
Thus Judaism, without being vigorously proselytising, is one of the most
geographically dispersed religions in the world.

Hinduism does not convert, but gradually assimilates. The mechanism of
Shuddhi (purification), started by the Arya Samaj, is a process of
=93recovering lost souls=94. But Hindus do migrate as in the case of countri=
es
such as Fiji and Mauritius. In such cases, an automatic link between
religion and territory is disturbed. Therefore, any effort to establish a
nation based on religion is doomed to fail.

If religion was indeed an accepted basis of nation formation, there would
have been only a few nations in the world. If religion alone had been the
basis of the nation-state, Pakistan would not have splintered to create
Bangladesh. Also, there would be no rationale for Pakistan and Afghanistan
to remain separate states.

Religions are diverse and heterogeneous from within. Intra-religious
intolerance is as much pronounced as inter-religious animosity. The tension
between the numerous denominations within Christianity is well known as are
those between Sunnis and Shias. The Ahmedias are not even counted as
Muslims by the two major Muslim sects. The tension between Sikhs and
Nirankaris is also all too familiar. Hinayana and Mahayana Buddhists are
not always at peace with each other.

To confuse matters more, Hutus and Tutsis =97 fierce enemies in Africa =97 =
are
both Catholics. In the case of Hinduism, deep divides based on castes and
languages is also prevalent. Therefore, the proposition of "one-nation, one
religion" is untenable.

Is the commonly floated idea of =93one culture, many religions=94 then
plausible? The postulate is a summation of a basic confusion, as the
coexistence of many religions necessarily implies the existence of
different layers of culture. To bring all these layers under one cultural
rubric =97 whether one calls it Indianisation or Hindutva =97 is to homogeni=
se
them. To annihilate their specificities is the exact opposite of cultural
pluralism.

What are the implications of establishing a nation based on one religion?
=46irst, since no part of the world is exclusively populated by one religiou=
s
community, to establish nations based on religions would mean one of the
following: one, annihilation of minority and/or weak religious groups; two,
their assimilation, either voluntarily or forced; three, their
marginalisation within the polity.

Thus, there are two inevitable consequences in establishing a
religion-based nation =97 genocide and/or a systematic liquidation of
cultures. Both are utterly anti-democratic and admittedly fascist. If
culturocide is attempted, this should inevitably lead to homogenisation of
cultures and hegemonisation by the dominant community. When demands are
made in India to stop beef-eating or pork-eating, this is precisely what is
implied.

Last year, Mahavir Jayanti and Id-ul-Zuha happened to fall on the same
day. Newspapers reported objections by the Jain community to meat-eating on
Mahavir Jayanti. For the Muslims, however, it is customary and sacral to
eat the meat of sacrificial goat on Id-ul-Zuha. Now the question is whose
belief or ritual should prevail? In a multi-religious democratic nation,
the customs of all religious communities ought to be respected. This is the
essence of cultural pluralism.

If a nation based on religion is established, those who do not belong to
the "national religion" are not simply =93minoritised=94, they are also
marginalised as a whole. Buddhists, Christians and Hindus are marginalised
in Bangladesh as well as in Pakistan. In Sri Lanka, Hindus, Christians and
Muslims are marginalised.

In India, although Hinduism is not the official religion, for all
practical purposes Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists =97 particularly
the first two =97 are marginalised. Additionally, the majority religious
community of the country may be marginalised in some parts of the country,
as in the case of Hindus in Kashmir.

Some religious minority groups are even viewed as outsiders. This is the
case of Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, Baha=92is and Jews in India. The
most recent manifestation of this mindset is the willingness to celebrate
Buddhist, Sikh and Jain jayantis but the refusal to acknowledge and
celebrate 2000 as the "Year of Christ". Such a move culturally orphans the
25 million Christians of India.

Even states with official religions treat co-religionists as outsiders
when they are outside their homelands. Thus, Muslims who migrated to
Pakistan from Uttar Pradesh with great enthusiasm are now treated as
outsiders or mohajirs. It is a similar case for Bihari Muslims in
Bangladesh. A state based on religion provides no guarantees to treat
dislocated co-religionists as co-nationals.

In a polity in which an exclusionary religious orientation prevails,
secularists, agnostics and atheists will have no freedom of expression. The
response to Salman Rushdie=92s The Satanic Verses or to M.F. Husain=92s
paintings of Saraswati and Sita or to Deepa Mehta=92s film Fire, vividly
illustrate this trend. When actual or contrived mass protests against such
documents or events occur, the states tend to ban them in the name of
maintaining law and order. This in turn means that both the state and
oppositional forces are intimidated by violent protests.

Nationalism has been trivialised over the years. During British rule,
swaraj was the goal. Self-rule included economic development, social reform
and the uplift of all (sarvodaya), particularly the poor (antyodaya).
Today=92s version of nationalism is a curious mix of things =97 exploding
nuclear devices, defeating the =93enemy=94 on the cricket pitch, torturing
cross-border migrants. In other words, nationalism survives by demonising
the =93Other=94. This is a negative and oppressive concept of nation and
nationalism. What we need instead is an emancipatory and inclusive notion
of nation and nationalism.

It is argued that Hinduism cannot be fundamentalist because it does not
have an identifiable founder, an ultimate text and a regulating church. And
yet it is true that both M.K. Gandhi and his assassin Nathuram Godse are
widely perceived by conflicting groups as =93good Hindus=94. The difference
between the two is fundamental. While Godse championed the cause of a
Hindu nation and state, the former rejected such a notion lock, stock
and barrel.

It is the exclusionary orientation which tends to make Hinduism
fundamentalist. It is not the Hinduism of the Vedanta, of Swami
Vivekananda, or of Gandhi.
______

#5.

Le Monde diplomatique
March 2000

SOCIAL CRISIS, POLITICAL STALEMATE
Why did Austria lurch to the right?

When J=F6rg Haider's Freedom Party joined the Austrian government on 3
=46ebruary, it aroused heated emotions all round Europe. The reaction
of the European governments - spectacular but short-lived - was followed by
massive demonstrations in Vienna and other capitals. But opposing the
far-right means getting a clear idea of the various forms it takes from one
country to another and the reasons for its success.

by PAUL PASTEUR *

J=F6rg Haider took over the Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei =D6sterreich=
s
or FP=D6) in 1986 and remained its "national-populist" (1) leader until his
surprise resignation on 29 February. During that time he notched up one
electoral success after another. From winning 5% of the votes in the 1960s,
the Freedom Party progressed under Haider's leadership to 16.6% in 1990 and
22.5% in 1994, to end up on 3 October 1999 as the second party in Austria
with 26.9% of the poll, 415 votes ahead of the conservative Austrian
People's Party (=D6sterreichische Volkspartei or =D6VP). How did this happen=
?

Many observers see the Freedom Party's success as a protest vote against a
political system that was frozen solid. Since the early 1950s, the Social
Democrats (Sozial-demokratische Partei =D6sterreichs, SP=D6) and the
christian-conservative People's Party had shared out the top political,
administrative and economic jobs between them on an unofficial basis of
proportionality. The social-democrat governments in power from 1970-83 made
no change to this. The Sozialpartnerschaft way of managing labour disputes,
designed to administer all aspects of labour relations by "sorting things
out together", has led to political paralysis. The trade union leaders
negotiate with the employers' bodies without calling for any individual
input from their members.

This inertia in society has been felt particularly keenly since 1986, a
watershed year in the history of modern Austria that saw Haider take charge
of the Freedom Party, the Greens enter parliament for the first time, and a
grand coalition of the Social-Democrats and People's Party restored, which
would stay in power until October 1999. By ignoring the need for openness,
neglecting anything to do with the environment, and then imposing austerity
budgets, the coalition left itself wide open to criticism from the Freedom
Party and, to a lesser extent, the Greens.

But 1986 was also the year Kurt Waldheim became president. Austrian society
was brought face-to-face, for the first time, with its historical skeleton
in the cupboard (2). International protest, the setting up of historical
commissions and then, in 1988, the debates prompted by the 50th anniversary
of the Anschluss and Kristallnacht (3) all helped cast doubt on the
official doctrine, upheld since 1945, that Austria had been "the first
victim of the Nazis".

Both Frantz Vranitzky, then chancellor, and President Waldheim recognised
officially that the Austrians had been personally involved in the crimes
committed in the name of the Third Reich. This is also recognised in the
document that President Thomas Klestil had signed by the
christian-conservative chancellor Wolfgang Sch=FCssel and his
national-populist ally on 3 February before he installed the new
government. But a shoulder-shrugging attitude to history still permeates
Austrian society. Despite some trenchant criticisms that are made of it, a
thorough denazification process was carried out; but it never achieved the
symbolic significance that was needed (4). Today's school textbooks include
no serious account of that period of history.

Heritage of German nationalism

Overprotected from and excused their historical responsibilities, the
Austrians are naturally receptive to putting the blame on others; and that
applies to everything the national-populists say and do. Stirring up
xenophobia is nothing new in Austria: the anti-Semitism of the mayor of
Vienna, Karl Lueger, and the anti-Slavism of the German nationalists are
essential features in the history of the Habsburg empire - an era all too
often raised to a mythical status or else reduced to the influence of
fin-de-si=E8cle Vienna. One could point, too, to the violence of
Kristallnacht or to how difficult or indeed impossible Austrian
anti-fascists found it to return when after 1945 they found themselves
treated as foreign agents. The Waldheim affair prompted among many
Austrians the same reflex of withdrawal into their shell that has been
triggered off again by the measures the European Union countries took when
the Freedom Party joined the government.

With the fall of the iron curtain and the wars in former Yugoslavia, the
1990s gave back to Vienna and other Austrian cities some of the
cosmopolitan atmosphere they had before 1914. But it is this sudden
presence of non-native groups in the population that has made Haider's
tub-thumping possible. The Freedom Party and its leader found no difficulty
in stirring up the latent xenophobia by slandering the refugees and the
low-budget tourists from central Europe and the Balkans. They have also
chosen to campaign against enlarging the EU towards the east, saying this
would put jobs and security at risk.

But this is not enough on its own to explain what has happened. One must
look at the profound changes that Austrian society has had to cope with
within just a few years. Globalisation, and integrating the country into
the EU, have brought among other things the privatisation of a vast
nationalised sector. European integration has been driven forward at a
cracking pace by the Social-Democrat/People's Party coalition, with no
attention to the effect it is having on everyday life for the Austrians.

More generally, the traditional parties had since the late 1980s been
following neoliberal economic and social policies at odds with their
initial pledges of solidarity, help for the worst-off and social justice.
This allowed Haider and the Freedom Party to make themselves - at least
while the electoral campaign lasted - the champions of pensions and social
rights. The new coalition's programme is likely to come as a shock to
voters for whom the only parts of the Freedom Party's national-populist
rhetoric they wanted to hear were attacks on the "old parties" and
"privileges for those at the top".

This rabble-rousing is serving the Freedom Party all the better as the
image of the two large families that Austrians feel they naturally belong
to has become fuzzy. For centuries the Catholic Church has reigned supreme
in Austria, and imposed its rule. Now, it is having to face up to a massive
defection: 40,000 officially leave the Church every year. What is more, the
bishops appointed by the Pope oppose the Vatican II line followed up to
now, leading to a deep internal crisis in the whole Catholic camp.

The social democrats, who for decades had tolerated a certain amount of
internal dissent and offered the prospect of a better future, are, after an
uninterrupted 30 years in power and 13 years of neoliberal management, no
longer able to arouse enthusiasm in anyone. Those who want unfettered
liberalism have found they can do better elsewhere. Since 3 February, when
the programme of the Freedom Party/People's Party coalition government was
unveiled, several generations of Austrians have been dumbfounded to
discover what they never realised before: that there are two ways of
running capitalism: the social-democrat way, and the ultraliberal.

Ultraliberalism is a characteristic of the Freedom Party (Freiheitliche
Partei means, literally, liberal party). Founded in 1956, the party is
difficult to get a clear hold on. It is the result of the merging of
several groups, the most important of which was the Union of Independents
(Verband der Unabh=E4ngigen, VdU). This was created in 1949, after the first
amnesty laws in 1948 had restored civil rights to the "less implicated" of
the ex-Nazis. While the VdU gathered in the great majority of these, the
traditional parties did not turn them away.

=46rom its beginnings the Freedom Party has had several strands, all sharing
the German nationalist heritage and a liberal background. In November 1997
the party adopted a new programme that expunged transparent references to
Nazism, especially its concept of Volksgemeinschaft (ethnic community) and
to pan-Germanism. Henceforth it embraced a "Christianity that fights for
its values". But the Freedom Party is different from the its
christian-conservative and social-democrat rivals - it is the successor not
of a single party but of various groupings of a very decentralised kind.

Active mainly in Carinthia, Upper Austria and the Salzburg province, these
never managed to establish a hold on Austrian society via mass
organisations on the social-democrat and christian-conservative pattern. As
a result the Freedom Party has a changing electorate in which certain
categories - male, Protestant, lapsed Christian, lower-middle-class, and
urban - have been over-represented. At least, that is, until Haider
attracted the young working class.

In this party, the leader's role has been to hold them all together,
smoothing out disagreements between the various factions. The liberal
tendency, which was in government with the Social-Democrats from 1983 to
1986 with Norbert Steger, has lost all influence. Liberals with a belief in
human rights and respect for the individual have been leaving the Freedom
Party since 1993. As the party's leader from 1986, Haider rebuked, punished
and excluded: in particular, he got rid of those most tainted with
neo-Nazism. Today the party machine is much smaller but totally on-message,
apart perhaps from the xenophobic millionaire Thomas Prinzhorn who, thanks
to the People's Party, has been elected as the parliament's vice-president.

So who is this man with such surprising political skills? Haider was born
in 1950 into a Nazi family. His father was an underground militant for the
Nazi party in Austria in the days when it was banned by the Austro-fascist
regime. His mother was an activist in the Bund deutscher M=E4del (the girls'
equivalent of the Hitler Youth). He always moved in German nationalist
circles; as a member of an association of German nationalist schoolboys,
and then of the student organisation, he came to the notice of Friedrich
Peter, an ex-SS man who was chairman of the Freedom Party.

=46rom then on his unstoppable rise began. The man who has dragged politics
through the mud is a pure product of the party machine. In 1968 he managed
the Liberal Youth organisation in Upper Austria and then from 1970-74 at
federal level. In 1974 he was called to Carinthia to run the Freedom Party
secretariat there. At that time Haider was supporting the nationalist line
in a party torn between its liberal wing and the German nationalist
tendency. Whenever he used the word "national" in those days, he meant
German national, since he denied the Austrian nation any real existence:
for him, it was no more than a "runt". He refused all rights to the Slovene
minority in Carinthia, and to other national minorities. He entered
parliament in 1979. Ten years later, aged 39, he was governor of Carinthia.
In 1991 he was removed from that post because of his now-notorious comment
about the Third Reich's "orderly employment policy".

Haider has been the archetype of a national-populist leader, able to change
styles from one moment to the next. He uses, and misuses, his natural
charm, his verbal faux-pas, his sonorous statements and his abrupt changes
of view. He constantly contradicts himself, as he has on Europe. On the
Sunday after the Freedom Party entered the government, he demanded a
parliamentary investigation of the republic's president and the
ex-chancellor for high treason, summoning up the myth of the "international
conspiracy" so beloved of the extreme right. It made all the headlines; and
by Monday he had given up the idea.

Having denounced the "old, rotten-to-the-core parties", the parliamentary
system, and foreigners, he changed tactics last year. Sensing he was close
to his goal of achieving power, he sought to make himself salonf=E4hig - mor=
e
presentable - not only in Austria where his party is in power in Carinthia
and the Vorarlberg thanks to the christian-conservatives, but in Europe as
well. This explains the public excuses offered last November for his
earlier "unfortunate" remarks.

Haider has kept, from his student days when he won prizes for public
speaking, the rare ability to pitch his style of expression to match his
public. He woos the working-class electorate using pithy comments targeted
at his opponents and designed to elicit the laughter or the acquiescence of
the average voter; yet in an instant he can switch to being the elegant Dr
Haider. His witticisms make any overstepping of the mark allowable; their
only purpose is to break one or other taboo in Austrian society - a
revisionist attempt to make the Nazi past respectable, or an attack on the
social partnership. Another of Haider's assets is his body language: he
moves well, and unlike the high-ups knows how to wear both traditional
Austria dress and jeans. Though women may be put off by the way he talks
and by his manners, men are able to identify with him.

This is the man who up to 1995 was demanding "respect for the veterans of
the Waffen SS", who calls the Romanians pickpockets, compares Europe to a
hen house, puts the fate of the Sudeten Germans and that of the Jewish
victims of Nazism on a par. The man who led the party with which on 3
=46ebruary the christian-conservative People's Party chose, amid deafening
silence from the Catholic church, to forge an alliance.
______________
* Paul Pasteur is a lecturer at Rouen University, author of Autriche. De la
lib=E9ration =E0 l'int=E9gration europ=E9enne, La Documentation fran=E7aise,=
Paris
1999, and a member of the editorial committee of Austriaca.

(1) Though its meaning is often confused, "populism" seems the right word
to use, so long as it is defined by five criteria: the desire to do away
with class boundaries and substitute a mythical "race" or a split between
the "big" and "little" people; the systematic use of demagoguery and
simplistic language; making a direct appeal to the people, together with a
visceral disdain for parliament and hatred of the system, bureaucracy and
intellectuals; the denouncing of a conspiracy blamed for all the ills
threatening the country; and nationalism. In the case of
"national-populism" this is coupled with the exclusion of others, in the
form of pillorying Jews and immigrants.

(2) Kurt Waldheim, who was UN Secretary-General for 10 years, was accused
of having been involved in the Balkans in putting down partisans and
deporting Jews while in German uniform during the war,.

(3) An anti-Semitic pogrom engineered by the Nazis on 9 November 1938
throughout the Reich including Austria.

(4) Special tribunals were set up after August 1945 that by 1953 dealt with
136,829 cases and sentenced 13,607 persons. See in particular Claudia
Kuretsidis-Haider and Winifried R. Garscha (eds.), Keine "Abrechnung"
NS-Verbrechen, Justiz und Gesellschaft in Europa nach 1945, Leipzig-Vienna,
1998, pp.9-129; Klaus Eisterer, La pr=E9sence fran=E7aise en Autriche
(1945-46). Occupation, d=E9nazification, action culturelle, PUR, Rouen, 1998=
,
pp.39-143.

Translated by Derry Cook-Radmore
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