By Andrew Bast

This weekend witnessed a worrying twist of fate in Bolivia. Voters went to the polls in a national referendum on the country’s leadership, and President Evo Morales won in a landslide. He took more than sixty percent of the vote, higher even than the fifty-three percent he won in the 2005 presidential election. His enthusiasm was unguarded. "I dedicate this victory to all the revolutionaries in the world," he proclaimed in a nighttime victory speech from the balcony of his presidential palace in the capital of La Paz. He had reason to celebrate. The vote cemented his leadership and gave momentum to what could likely be his landmark accomplishment in office, rewriting the country’s constitution.

The twist is that voters not only cast ballots on the president, but on their local leaders as well, and a coterie of opposition governors in the country’s wealthy eastern provinces--Morales’ chief adversaries--also won in the referendum. For months they have been organizing against Morales. The departments of Santa Cruz, Tarija, Pando and Beni have all voted to become more autonomous from the central government, challenging Morales’ centralization of power in La Paz, his land reform initiative and his reengineering of the constitution. “The outcome of the vote in Bolivia is likely to only deepen the wounds between two fiercely antagonistic political projects,” says Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue. “Each side will be tempted to dig in even further.” How Morales plays his so-called revolutionary hand will very much determine Bolivia’s future. Morales would be wise to watch his autocratic ally, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, for what not to do; better to err on the side of democracy and demonstrate real skill as a politician.

Bolivia’s provinces, especially Tarija, are rich in natural gas, making the situation all the more volatile. After taking office, Morales nationalized the industry, straining tensions to the breaking point. Recently, autonomy protests in the provinces have turned violent, and the memories of the 2003 protests over the country’s natural gas reserves, which left eighty people dead, ousted President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and helped bring Morales to power, are still fresh. The issue is as raw as any in the country and could give rise to conflict once again.

A resolution seems distant. Morales has said publicly that he is prepared to talk with the governors, though no one knows what, if any, concessions he would be willing to make. From the outside, the U.S. State Department has said it "stands ready to assist" the discussions, despite its tormented relationship with Morales’ government. Spain, Bolivia’s once-colonial administrator, has also offered to help nudge talks along. The most promising pledge came this week from the Organization of American States, which is headed by the Chilean José Miguel Insulza and had a major success earlier this year when it passed a resolution in March to resolve the standoff between Hugo Chávez and Colombia. In Bolivia, negotiations are the next logical step, but with both sides boosted by big wins at the polls, when, where or on what terms are all big question marks rather than agenda items.

In addition to touting his success as another victory for the revolution, Morales has said that his presidency “starts a new Bolivian history.” Indeed, he is the first indigenous president to be elected in Latin America, and his proposed constitutional reforms would lend political representation to the long-disenfranchised indigenous majorities in the country. But his presidency is not a revolution. It is the result of votes and process and democracy, and with that recognition comes the undeniable fact that he cannot write off the past, no matter how much he may want to.

After a stinging defeat of his Venezuelan constitutional reforms in December, Morales’ staunch ally Hugo Chávez last week decided to instead issue his reforms by decree, subverting the democratic process. Morales would be wise to learn from his mentor, namely that such autocratic strategies make for bad so-called revolutions. Changing Bolivian history could mean bringing the country together, not fanning the flames of autonomy by strong-arming the opposition. Since they have popular support in their provinces, the governors’ grievances deserve a fair hearing, and if Morales has the political skill to bring them into the fold, 21st-century socialism in Bolivia could establish a sound democratic foundation. Considering the way that Chávez’s project is being left behind by less bellicose leaders like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Morales’ aim may be morally admirable, but his method will have to be more independently minded.

Refugees International researchers were surprised when they showed up in Taghi Naghi, an area in northwestern Afghanistan in June to assess one of the country’s 11 “land allocation schemes” for returning refugees. What they found differed sharply from the government’s plans for the hundreds of thousands of people returning from exile in Pakistan and Iran. Despite UN objections, the shelters had been built in the desert, an hour’s trip to the nearest city of Herat. A water pump was hooked up to a dry well, but an NGO trucking in water said their contract was going to run out soon after the visit. Only 12 families were occupying the more than 200 shelters that had been built, none of whom had any means of finding employment. According to one man living at Taghi Naghi, he might be forced to move his family to Herat despite being unable to pay its high city rents, since it was becoming increasingly difficult to feed his children.

The floundering Taghi Naghi project, one of 55 planned across Afghanistan, cost $2 million, and is just one example of how the refugee situation in Afghanistan is bad and growing worse, according to a Refugees International (RI) report published July 10. Since things started looking up for Afghanistan in 2002, the largest-ever refugee homecoming brought more than 5 million Afghan refugees back into the country, some of whom had been living in exile for three decades as their country weathered war with the Soviets, Taliban rule, and the NATO invasion. But over 3 million people are still stranded in exile, RI says, while many of those who have returned are ill-equipped to deal with Afghanistan’s harsh land and security crises. Deteriorating conditions in recent months due to a food crisis and an insurgency again on the rise have further complicated matters, while an impending Pakistani threat to bulldoze camps in their country by the end of 2009 has contributed an added time pressure to deal with the problems.

“The situation in Afghanistan is worsening, and we’re running the risk of losing the gains we’ve made in the past few years,” said RI advocate Patrick Duplat, who produced the report after traveling with a colleague for a month to meet with refugees in Pakistan and returnees in Afghanistan. “Of course, the situation in general in Afghanistan is quite dire. From 40 to 60 percent of the country is inaccessible, so all Afghans are vulnerable. But that being said, a large percentage of the population--5 million people--are particularly vulnerable.”
 
The report blames a lack of planning and coordination on the part of both Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government and its international backers, who provide over 90 percent of the country’s budget. While billions of dollars have been invested in reconstruction projects in Afghanistan since 2001, too few have made their way to real development projects, RI contends; large-scale infrastructure and counter-insurgency efforts have sapped most of the funds.

As a result, RI is calling on donors to coordinate and fund their efforts in Afghanistan at a joint UN and Afghan conference in Kabul in November. “What we’d like to see is the returnees being integrated into the mainstream national programs,” said Duplat, cautioning that a failure to act could lead refugees to either try their luck at returning to Pakistan or swell the ranks of Afghanistan’s urban poor. A lack of resources is not the problem, he says; the international community just needs to put its money where its mouth is to integrate refugees without forcibly displacing them, whether they want to come back to Afghanistan or stay in Pakistan permanently.

By Jacopo Barigazzi

By Andrew Ehrenkranz

On the eve of a proposed million-man opposition protest rally in Kenya recently, a spokesman for the “Taliban” in Kenya called NEWSWEEK, asking to meet somewhere in Nairobi. The man, who called himself Abraham, said he had urgent news of an 11th hour meeting between Kikuyu and Luo tribal elders in a Nairobi market, where they were attempting to broker a truce before an all-out war broke out in the slums of Nairobi. He tried to convey the contours and severity of the situation for his Luo people, of whom the Taliban claim to be defending, but one simple question needed an answer: Of all the names in the world for a group of 100 percent Christian, mainly large African men from Nairobi, why use the name “Taliban”?

“People already knew the name,” he said of "Taliban", reminding me that his so-called volunteer Luo defense force has nothing to do with the Afghani Taliban, or for that matter, the brand of terrorism practiced by Islamic fundamentalists. “The Taliban defended their people and their way of life. So are we.”

In France this week, we’ve seen a local story spread round the world in flaming images. On Sunday, two teenage boys in the impoverished Parisian suburb of Villiers-le-Bel were killed when the small motorbike they were riding collided with a police car. The incident sparked local riots among youth who blamed police for the teens’ deaths. (An official investigation into the collision is ongoing.)

Whatever the real cause of the accident, it evoked echoes of the national riots that spread across almost 300 similarly economically depressed towns and suburbs throughout the country-and fears that something similar could happen again.  Back in October 2005, two teenage boys were electrocuted when they sought refuge from police in a power sub-station in Clichy-sous-Bois, another downscale suburb of Paris with large minority populations. That incident resulted in 10,000 torched cars and 300 torched buildings over three long weeks. The tough-talking Interior Minister in charge of law and order then, Nicolas Sarkozy, is now president.

For the last two years running, bankers in London, New York and Tokyo have reaped record-breaking bonuses, sending bountiful ripples through their local economies in the form of everything from gasp-worthy bar bills to astronomical property prices. Many movers and shakers, buoyed by a record $3,300 billion worth of mergers and acquisitions activity globally in the first half of this year, were hoping that the coming bonus season would prove three’s the charm.

That was, of course, until America’s subprime mortgage crisis sent the global economy into a penny-pinching credit crunch.

Nick Hayes is an intern in our London bureau. He normally arrives to work on time, but not today. Here he tells us why: 

I just got a taste what life must have been like in Britain in the 70s -- when strikes erupted on a regular basis and angry workers engaged in running battles with the government of the day. Transport for London, the company that runs London's famous underground system, failed to come to terms with the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers. The result has been chaos on the subway since Monday afternoon -- and this could stretch to the end of the week.