After the Rain : how the West lost the East Part 6

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

(Who is Guarding the Guards?)

Izetbegovic, the nominal president of the nominal Bosnian state, the darling of the gullible western media, denies that he and his cronies and his cronies' cronies stole 40% of all civilian aid targeted at Bosnia - a minor matter of 1 billion US dollars and change, in less than 4 years. The tribes of the Balkans stop bleeding each other to death only when they gang up to bleed another. In this, there are no races and no traces - everyone is equal under the sign of the dollar.

Serbs, Bosnians and Croats divided the loot with the loftiest of egalitarian instincts. Honour among thieves transformed into honour among victims and their murderers. Mammon is the only real authority in this G.o.d forsaken, writhing rump of a country.

And not only there.

In Russia, billions (3 to 5) were transferred to secret off sh.o.r.e bank accounts to be "portfolio managed" by mysterious fly-by-night ent.i.ties.

Many paid with their jobs when the trail led to the incestuous Yeltsin clan and their Byzantine court.

Convoys snake across the mountainous Kosovo, bringing smuggled goods at exorbitant prices to the inhabitants of this parched territory - all under the avuncular gaze of multinational peacekeepers.

In Romania, Hungary and Greece, UN forces have been known to take bribes to allow goods into besieged Serbia. Oil, weapons and strategic materials, all slid across this greasy channel of the international brotherhood of cash.

A lot of the aid, ostensibly intended to ameliorate the state of refugedom imposed upon the unsuspecting, harried population of Kosovo - resurfaced in markets, white and black, across the region. Food, blankets, tents, electrical equipment, even toys - were on offer in bazaars from Skopje to Podgorica and from Sofia to Thessalonica, replete with the stamps of the unwitting donors. Aid workers scurried back and forth in expensive utility vehicles, buzzing mobile phones in hand and latest model, officially purchased, infrared laptops humming in the air conditioned coolness of their five star hotel rooms (or fancy apartments). In their back pockets they safeguarded their first cla.s.s tickets (the food is better and the stewardesses...). The scavengers of every carnage, they descended upon this tortured land in redundant hordes, feeding off the misery, the autoimmune deficiency of the syndrome of humanism.

Ask yourselves: how could one of every 3 dollars - 50% of GNP - be stolen in a country the size of a tiny American state - without the knowledge and collaboration of the international organizations which ostensibly manage this bedlam? Why did the IMF renew the credit lines to a Russia, which cheated bold-facedly regarding its foreign exchange reserves? How was Serbia awash and flush with oil and other goods prohibited under the terms of the never-ending series of embargoes imposed upon it?

The answer is that potent c.o.c.ktail of fear and graft. First came fear - that Russia will collapse, that the Balkans will spill over, that Bosnia will disintegrate. Nuclear nightmares intermingled with Armenian and Jewish flashbacks of genocide. The west shut its eyes tight and threw money at the bad spirits of irredentism and re-emergent communism. The long arm of the USA, the "international" financial inst.i.tutions, collaborated in constructing the habit forming dole house that Eastern and Southern Europe has become. This conflict-reticence, these approach-avoidance cycles led to an inevitable collusion between the ruling mob families that pa.s.s for regimes in these parts of the planet - and the unilateral inst.i.tutions that pa.s.s for multilateral ones in the rest of it. An elaborate system of winks and nods, the sign language of inst.i.tutional rot and decaying governance, took over.

Greasy palms clapped one another with the eerie silence of conspiracy.

The world looked away as both - international financial inst.i.tutions and corrupt regimes - robbed their const.i.tuencies blind. This was perceived to be the inevitable moral cost of stability. Survival of the majority entailed the filthy enrichment of the minority. And the west acquiesced.

But this grand design backfired. Like insidious bacteria, corruption breeds violence and hops from host to host. It does not discriminate, this plague of black conscience, between east and west. As it infected the indigenous, it also affected their guardians. They were all engulfed by raging greed, by a degradation of the inhibitions and by the intoxicating promiscuity of lawlessness. Inebriated by their newly found powers, little Caesars - natives and financial colonialists - claimed their little plots of crime and avarice, a not so secret order of disintegration of the social fabric. A ghoulish landscape, shrouded in the opaque mist of the nomenclature, the camaraderie of the omnipotent.

And corruption bred violence. The Chicago model imported lock, stock and the barrel of the gun. Former cronies disappeared mysteriously, bloated corpses in stale hotel rooms - being the only "contracts"

honoured. Territories were carved up in constant, unrelenting warfare.

One billion dollars are worth a lot of blood and it was spilled with glee, with the enthusiasm of the inevitable, with the elation of gambling all on a single spin of the Russian roulette.

It is this very violence that the west tried to drown with its credits.

But unbeknownst to it, this very violence thrived on these pecuniary fertilizers. A plant of horrors, it devoured its soil and its cultivators alike. And 120,000 people paid with their lives for this wrong gamble. Counting its losses, the west is poised to spin the wheel again. More money is ama.s.sed, the dies are cast and more people cast to die.

(Article written on August 23, 1999 and published September 13, 1999

in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 12)

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Herzl's Butlers

James Cook misled the British government back home by neglecting to report about the aborigines he spotted on the beaches of New Holland.

This convenient omission allowed him to claim the territory for the crown. In the subsequent waves of colonization, the aborigines perished. Modern Australia stands awash in their blood, constructed on their graves, thriving on their confiscated lands. The belated efforts to redress these wrongs meet with hostility and the atavistic fears of the dispossessor.

In "Altneuland" (translated to Hebrew as "Tel Aviv"), the feverish tome composed by Theodore Herzl, Judaism's improbable visionary - Herzl refers to the Arabs as pliant and compliant butlers, replete with gloves and tarbushes. In the book, a German Jewish family prophetically lands at Jaffa, the only port in erstwhile Palestine. They are welcomed and escorted by "Briticized" Arab gentlemen's gentlemen who are only too happy to a.s.sist their future masters and colonizers to disembark.

In between these extremes - of annihilation and a.s.similation - modern Europe has come up with a plethora of models and solutions to the question of minorities, which plagued it and still does. Two schools of thought emerged: the nationalistic-ethnic versus the cultural.

Europe has always been torn between centrifugal and centripetal forces.

Multi-ethnic empires alternated with swarms of mini-states with dizzying speed. European Unionism clashed with brown-turning-black nationalism and irredentism. Universalistic philosophies such as socialism fought racism tooth and nail. European history became a blood-dripping pendulum, swung by the twin yet conflicting energies of separation and integration. The present is no different. The dream of the European Union confronted the nightmare of a dismembered Yugoslavia throughout the last decade. And ethnic tensions are seething all across the continent. Hungarians in Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine and Serbia, Bulgarians in Moldova, Albanians in Macedonia, Russians in the Baltic countries, even Padans in Italy and the list is long.

The cultural school of co-existence envisaged multi-ethnic states with shared philosophies and value systems, which do not infringe upon the maintenance and preservation of the ethnic ident.i.ties of their components. The first socialists adopted this model enthusiastically.

They foresaw a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural socialist mega-state. The socialist values, they believed, will serve as the glue binding together the most disparate of ethnic elements. In the event, it took a lot more than common convictions. It took suppression on an unprecedented scale and it took concentration camps and the morbid application of the arts and sciences of death. And even then both the n.a.z.i Reich and the Stalinist USSR fell to ethnic pieces.

The national(istic) school supports the formation of ethnically h.o.m.ogenous states, if necessary, by humane and gradual (or inhuman and abrupt) ethnic cleansing. h.o.m.ogeneity is empirically linked to stability and, therefore, to peace, economic prosperity and oftentimes to democracy. Heterogeneity breeds friction, hatred, violence, instability, poverty and authoritarianism. The conclusion is simple: ethnicities cannot co-exist. Ethnic groups (a.k.a. nations) must be left to their own devices, put differently: they must be allocated a piece of land and allowed to lead their lives as they see fit. The land thus allocated should correspond, as closely as possible, with the birthplace of the nation, the scenery of its past and the cradle of its culture.

The nationalist school depended on denial and repression of the existence of heterogeneity and of national minorities. This was done by:

a.Ethnic Cleansing

Greece and Turkey exchanged population after the First World War.

Czechoslovakia expelled the Sudeten Germans after the Second World War and the n.a.z.is rendered big parts of Europe Judenrein. Bulgarians forced Turks to flee. The Yugoslav succession wars were not wars in the Clausewitz sense - rather they were protracted guerrilla operations intended to ethnically purge swathes of the "motherland".

b.Ethnic Denial

In 1984, the Bulgarian communist regime forced the indigenous Turkish population to "Bulgarize" their names. The Slav minorities in the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were forced to "Magyarize" following the 1867 Compromise. Franco's Spain repressed demands for regional autonomy. Other, more democratic states fostered a sense of national unity by ma.s.s media and school indoctrination. Every facet of life was subjected to and incorporated in this relentless and unforgiving pursuit of national ident.i.ty: sports, chess, national holidays, heroes, humour. The particularisms of each group gained meaning and legitimacy only through and by their incorporation in the bigger picture of the nation. Thus, Greece denies to this very day that there are Turks or Macedonians on its soil. There are only Muslim Greeks, it insists (often brutally and in violation of human and civil rights). The separate ident.i.ties of Brittany and Provence were submerged within the French collective one and so was the ident.i.ty of the Confederate South in the current USA. Some call it "cultural genocide".

The nationalist experiment failed miserably. It was pulverized by a million bombs, slaughtered in battlefields and concentration camps, set ablaze by fanatics and s.a.d.i.s.ts. The pendulum swung. In 1996, Hungarians were included in the Romanian government and in 1998 they made it to the Slovakian one. In Macedonia, Albanian parties took part in all the governments since independence. The cultural school, on the ascendance, was able to offer three variants:

1.The Local Autonomy

Ethnic minorities are allowed to use their respective languages in certain munic.i.p.alities where they const.i.tute more than a given percentage (usually twenty) of the total population. Official doc.u.ments, street signs, traffic tickets and education all are translated to the minority language as well as to the majority's. This rather meaningless placebo has a surprisingly tranquillizing effect on restless youth and nationalistic zealots. In 1997, police fought local residents in a few Albanian munic.i.p.alities precisely on this issue.

2.The Territorial Autonomy

Ethnic minorities often const.i.tute a majority in a given region. Some "host" countries allow them to manage funds, collect taxes and engage in limited self-governance. This is the regional or territorial autonomy that Israel offered to the Palestinians (too late) and that Kosovo and Vojvodina enjoyed under the 1974 Yugoslav const.i.tution (which Milosevic shredded to very small pieces). This solution was sometimes adopted by the nationalist compet.i.tion itself. The n.a.z.is dreamt up at least two such territorial "final solutions" for the Jews (one in Madagascar and one in Poland). Stalin gave the Jews a decrepit wasteland, Birobidjan, to be their "homeland". And, of course, there were the South African "homelands".

3.The Personal Autonomy

Karl Renner and Otto Bauer advanced the idea of the individual as the source of political authority - regardless of his or her domicile.

Between the two world wars, Estonia gave personal autonomy to its Jews and Russians. Wherever they were, they were ent.i.tled to vote and elect representatives to bodies of self-government. These had symbolic taxation powers but exerted more tangible authority over matters educational and cultural. This idea, however benign sounding, encountered grave opposition from right and left alike. The right wing "exclusive" nationalists rejected it because they regarded minorities the way a sick person regards his germs. And the left wing, "inclusive", nationalists saw in it the seeds of discrimination, an anathema.