http://www.isn.ethz.ch/news/sw/details.cfm?ID=14406
Bolivia's Morales seeks solidarity in S Africa Bolivian president-elect Evo Morales, the South American country's first indigenous leader, visited South Africa last week seeking advice on racial reconciliation and solidarity with his plans to place his country's vast gas reserves under public ownership and nationalize social services. Peter Bauermeister ISN By Shaun Benton in Cape Town for ISN Security Watch (17/01/06) Evo Morales, Bolivia's socialist president-elect, ended a global tour this week, returning to South America after visiting Venezuela, China, and Europe, and stopping in South Africa where he discussed economic and political transformation and post-conflict reconciliation. Morales, who will become Bolivia's first indigenous president after winning a landslide victory on 18 December, left South Africa disappointed only that he had not managed to meet Nelson Mandela, a South African hero who ranks alongside South American revolutionary Che Guevara. Mandela's itinerary was full, having being drawn to Mozambique to a forum of former heads of state gathered in Maputo to use their influence to eradicate poverty and work at conflict resolution. But Morales visited Mandela's cramped former prison cell on Robben Island, the notorious island off the city of Cape Town. The island was used to incarcerate political prisoners throughout South Africa's centuries of colonialism and its even more bitter product, the system of institutionalized racism, or apartheid. Mandela spent more than a decade of his 27 years in South Africa's prisons in that cell. The visit left Morales feeling depressed, he told journalists later on Thursday, "to see how Mr. Mandela lived for so many years". After visiting the cell, Morales wrote in the prison visitor's book that he wished to express, in the name of the Bolivian people, the deep admiration and respect that South Africans - "especially the black people" - deserved for their resistance against oppression and subsequent liberation. He was accompanied to Robben Island by Jeremy Cronin, the deputy secretary general of the South African Communist Party and a member of the national executive committee of the ruling African National Congress, who was himself a political prisoner for seven years during apartheid. Now also as chairman of one of the South African parliament's powerful committees, Cronin's discussions with the Bolivian president-elect included the larger responsibilities and difficulties that come with governing, in contrast to what they agreed appeared to be the comparatively simpler role of resistance to oppression and exploitation. The former leader of Bolivia's peasant class of coca farmers rose through the ranks of the peasant and worker movements to sew together the twin threads of the country's powerful socialist and nationalist movements, risen out of the harsh legacy of almost 500 years of Spanish colonialism. Morales would have found remarkable resemblance to South Africa's own political legacy, shaped by centuries of colonialism followed by what has been analyzed as the "internal colonialism" of apartheid. Morales capped off his visit to South Africa by meeting Nobel Peace laureate Archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu, who led South Africa's post-conflict Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Morales congratulated Archbishop Tutu for "his struggles for the black people", receiving the quick reply from the cleric and that those struggles were "for everybody". The Archbishop congratulated Morales, the leader of Bolivia's Movement for Socialism (MAS) party, on his upcoming 22 January inauguration as president. The South African leg of Morales' world tour in search of material and ideological support for his transformation program was sponsored - with EU funds - by the Club de Madrid, a recently formed organization of former heads of state. Nacho Espinosa, a Club de Madrid program official, said the group was keen to show Morales a model of a country that had transcended racial conflict and racially based exploitation with an accommodative, inclusive democracy rooted in the principles of political dialogue and compromise. Morales said his trip to South Africa had "strengthened us [the Bolivians] to learn to be responsible for the changes in our country". Espinosa said Morales had choices to exercise, with a "winner takes all" option after taking more than 50 per cent of the vote in a victory assisted, ironically, by remarks by US representatives urging Bolivians not to vote for a man Washington once reportedly described as a "narco-terrorist". In the 18 December election, despite the US threatening to withdraw aid from the impoverished, coca-producing nation - where indigenous Bolivians make up more than 60 per cent of the population - Morales was voted in as president. Morales has said he planned to cease cooperation with the US in eradicating production of the traditional, labor-intensive coca crop, arguing that Americans must deal with the problem of the massive demand in the US for coca refined into cocaine. Members of Club de Madrid must then have been pleased the day before, when Morales, after meeting President Mbeki in Pretoria told reporters that he welcomed an offer of dialogue from the US. Any dialogue to "end discrimination" was welcome, Morales told reporters in Pretoria, adding that he forgave those in the White House for "so many humiliations". South African President Thabo Mbeki offered Morales "strong political support" as well as advice on political transformation as the Bolivian leader prepares to draw up a planned constituent assembly that will cement the economic and political rights of indigenous Bolivians in the constitution. Morales later received from a South African deputy foreign minister, Sue van der Merwe, a draft agreement on future bilateral relations that had been drawn up, he said, on the instructions of President Mbeki. Mbeki and Morales did not discuss the planned nationalization of Bolivia's natural gas industry, a subject that Morales evidently chose to save for discussions with South Africa's emerging black business elites, such as Cyril Ramaphosa, a former unionist who helped establish the powerful National Union of Mineworkers and who is now among the country's wealthiest businessmen. Ramaphosa reportedly explained to Morales the South African government's policy of the state assuming ownership of mineral resources and then licensing the exploitation of these to private businesses. Morales has a powerful mandate that hinges largely around his anti-poverty agenda of "recovering" the natural gas deposits owned largely by foreign ownership. In Bolivia's previous election four years ago, candidate Gonzales Sanchez de Lozado won with barely 23 per cent of the vote, compared with Morales's close-on 54 per cent last year. "Natural resources cannot be privatized; the people through the state have the right to exercise the right to ownership," Morales told reporters in Cape Town. He added that it is a "violation of human rights" for water supply to become a private enterprise. All social services must be deprivatized, he said. Water is an emotive issue for Bolivians, and some say Morales' election victory was partly grounded in the increased mobilization of Bolivians in recent years as they struggled, successfully, against efforts to privatize the water supply in several cities. Morales insists Bolivians will be the owners of the country's resources as he attempts to reformulate the rules of engagement with foreign companies operating in Bolivia, much to the chagrin of the US, which has already seen the balance of power shifting on the southern continent with the rise of power of oil-rich Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. If he has taken much advice to heart from South Africans, Morales is likely to become more measured if no less determined in his efforts, and will seek to avoid alienating foreign investors. In Morales's last remarks in South Africa, made at Archbishop Tutu's Cape Town offices shortly before he left to meet another South American ally, Brazilian President Luiz Ignacio "Lula" da Silva, he said: "I ask publicly that the personalities we have met [in South Africa] will continue to accompany the changes [in Bolivia]." As a revolutionary figure of hope for South America's impoverished lower classes, he is likely to get the solidarity he is seeking from Africa's most powerful nation. In remarks echoing the sentiments of his hero, statesman Nelson Mandela, Morales told reporters in Cape Town: "The presidency is just a circumstance, but to be a comrade in the struggle - that is for good." Shaun Benton has written for numerous newspapers, magazines, websites and news agencies over the past 18 years, focusing largely on hard news, political and economic developments and human rights. 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