Black and White Cat

Of memory and forgetting

Drive east from Algiers and eventually the road will carry you up through the mountains and valleys of Kabylie. From the city of Tizi Ouzou, continue to climb into the villages where children stop and stare at a rare Arab visitor, just as Chinese villagers stare at Europeans they have seen in pictures, but never in the flesh.

It was here in one of these villages in the intense, dry heat of August, 1987, that I arrived with my friend Rabah to see the place where he had been born and lived as a child. His best friend, whose name I have forgotten, was still there and when everyone else had gone to bed the two of us sat deep into the night, smoking and talking. He was a radical Berber nationalist, fiercely proud of his culture and furious with the state. For hours, he poured out a litany of grievances, from government corruption and repression to the banning of his native language in schools.

Some in the country acted as if they were oblivious to these and many other tensions, but it seemed obvious to me that Algeria was a powder keg ready to explode. And so it came as no surprise in October the following year when students took to the streets. They were an eclectic mix of communists, Islamists and Berber nationalists and their aims were conflicting. But all of them were angry. The government’s response was swift and brutal. Hundreds of young people were shot dead by the army, mown down with machine guns. I’d lost touch with Rabah, so I still do not know to this day if his friend was among the dead or the wounded, or one of the thousands who were rounded up and tortured. Nor do I know if any of the people I met are still alive after the orgy of killing that erupted in 1992.

On a beautiful, warm summer evening at the beginning of June, 1989, I was sitting in a cheap Chinese restaurant in London eating duck and rice with one of my university teachers. She asked me what I thought was going to happen in Beijing. It was the massacres in Algiers and Tizi Ouzou that were foremost in my mind and I had a dark foreboding that this was what Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng were about to do. But it seemed too terrible to say such things aloud and I hoped that I was wrong. So I kept it to myself and simply said, “I don’t know.”

On the night of June 3, it began. And on that night, and in the days that followed, hope died.

The hopes and fears of spring, 1989, and their bloody end in June will remain forever seared into the memories of those who saw the events first hand, or watched with horror from a distance on our television screens.

But there was another massacre in 1989; one that few in the English-speaking world have even heard of. In February that year, Venezuelans rose up against a massive rise in fuel prices, part of a package of neoliberal reforms that were the straw that broke the camel’s back. The poor protested, rioted and looted, seizing the food and goods that had been denied them and the complacent middle classes and rich took for granted. The uprising became known as the Caracazo and it would turn out to be one of the most significant events of the late 20th Century.

The Venezuelan government responded with extreme violence. It later said 300 people had been killed in the military crackdown, but estimates of the dead go as high as 3,000 - remarkably similar to the casualty range in Beijing. Some troops refused to open fire on their own people. Others were disgusted with what they had been ordered to do. And the poor, though crushed for the time being, remembered.

It is impossible to understand Venezuela today without knowing at least something about the Caracazo, its causes and consequences. It marked the beginning of the end of the established political parties, producing Hugo Chavez’s attempted coup in 1992, his election victory in 1998 and his repeated re-election ever since. Its effects have reverberated around Latin America and, ultimately, around the world. And yet, I ask you, have you ever heard of it?

If you haven’t, it’s not surprising. A search of the Guardian’s website produces a grand total of six results, none of them specifically about the Caracazo and the massacre that followed, but the articles do at least acknowledge its existence. And that is the best that Britain’s media can muster. The Independent, no mention whatsoever. The Times, nothing. The Daily Telegraph, nada, zilch.

How about the United States? The New York Times mentions the Caracazo three times. The Washington Post, not once. The LA Times has one result. It was published 17 years ago.

How could this happen? To gain just a glimpse of how important the Caracazo is to Venezuela, do a Google News search and see how many articles have referred to it in the last month alone. The left and the right remember it and interpret it in vastly different ways, but they all remember it and repeatedly refer to it.

No reporter based in Venezuela could possibly be unaware of the Caracazo and its significance. And yet not one of them ever mentions it. In China, the government forbids any media recollection of the 1989 movement and the June 4 crackdown. No such ban exists for the Washington Post or the Times on mentioning the Caracazo. That silence is entirely voluntary.

In spring, 1990, Taiwanese students launched a democracy movement in Taipei that was, in many ways, very similar to that of their mainland counterparts a year earlier. It ended peacefully, with the government agreeing to set up a commission to address their grievances and demands. Supposing it hadn’t? What if the events in Taiwan and the mainland had been switched? What if the students in Taipei had refused to compromise and the KMT had ordered the military to crush them? Like the Caracazo, I suspect that few readers of the English-language press would know anything about it at all.

As the 20th anniversary of the Beijing massacre approaches, it is absurd that this subject still cannot be discussed by the media or in books here on the mainland. Its causes and effects cannot be analyzed; its lessons cannot be learned. It is equally absurd that media in the West continually remember this massacre, but ignore others. Here in China, June 4 has “been faded.” In Britain and the United States, the Caracazo has been disappeared.

Which movements, rebellions and massacres we choose to remember, and which to forget, say more about ourselves than about reality itself.