by John Pilger
‘It is just not acceptable’, says Lewis T. Preston, ‘that so many people in the world have to live on less than a dollar a day.’38 The 6,000 employees of the World Bank are unlikely to find themselves in such straits. Middle-ranking civil servants earn 300 times the per capita income of half of humanity, and their perks include first-class air travel and tenure in deluxe hotels, costing up to $45 million a year.39
As part of Bangkok’s ‘beautification’ for the conference, an iron wall was built opposite the convention centre, painted in bright murals and draped with a ‘Welcome to Thailand’ sign. Alas, during a heavy downpour the sign fell down, revealing to the delegates a large number of poor people hidden behind the wall. These are the slum people of Klong Toey. To most of them ‘beautification’ has meant eviction to places where it is often impossible for them to resume work as street vendors, or keep their jobs as day labourers and domestics.
For as long as I have been coming to Bangkok, one of the city’s landmarks, as you drove in from the airport, was a small town of people living beside the railway tracks. A few weeks before the World Bank conference began, everything was bulldozed: homes, a kindergarten, a school. The people were moved to wasteland well out of sight of the to-ing and fro-ing Volvos, though still beside the railway line. Each was given £90 as ‘removal expenses’. They have no electricity and running water, and the army says it wants its tents back once the conference is over. The Miss Universe circus is due next, and another 5,000 people are likely to be evicted.
The beautifiers and bankers have not had it all their way. Forty-three countries have sent representatives to an International People’s Forum at Chulalongkorn University. People who have been both victims and opponents of ‘development’ have spoken, often movingly, about the effects of World Bank capital projects, and IMF austerity programmes in their countries.
Vandana Shiva from India described how hundreds of thousands of people had been made homeless all over India by flooding caused by World Bank dams and irrigation schemes, which have taken little account of the environmental impact. ‘They see only new markets and new investment zones that come with the dams,’ she said. ‘They cause these environmental disasters because it is assumed that “development” must come from outside. They think they bear a kind of White Man’s Burden; but they do not really study life.’40
According to American economist Patricia Adams, ‘World Bank-sponsored hydro projects have flooded a million and a half people off their land; and another million and a half are about to follow.’41 One of the themes of the World Bank conference has been the Bank’s new ‘green’ image as it emphasises the need to protect the environment. In selecting Thailand as the venue of its conference this year, the bank is making a point that the Thai economy should serve as an example to others. In fact, Thailand is the model exploitative economy: an environmental disaster, with its great forests wiped out by uncontrolled logging and profiteering.
I put several of these ‘unmentionables’ to senior officials of the World Bank and the IMF, in particular the conclusions of the UNICEF study that more than half a million children died every year as a result of high growth rate and austerity policies imposed by the institutions.42 The officials sought to discredit the UNICEF figures. ‘Oh, that one’s got suspect data,’ said Richard Erb, deputy managing director of the IMF. He offered nothing to support his statement.
There have been numerous sideshows. The most demeaning was a press conference called by the Russians to announce that they were more ‘pro-market’ than anyone. One of them said, ‘Comrade Yavlinsky wants to explain his views on . . .’ He was interrupted by his colleague, who said, ‘What’s this comrade stuff?’ To which the first Russian replied, ‘My God! Sorry. Old habits die hard.’43
The saddest are the Vietnamese, who fought for half a century to free their country from colonialism and to establish a national health care system, remarkable by Third World standards, as well as free education and a minimum wage. In Bangkok, the Vietnamese have been promising to do almost anything to get the United States to lift its embargo so that the IMF can ‘structurally adjust’ them and impose more austerity, if that’s possible. They say they have no choice but to sell off much of the forests not destroyed by American defoliants; and they took the opportunity to announce that they had abolished the minimum wage. Their labour force will now be the cheapest in Asia, which means that people must work in ‘free-enterprise zones’ for a pittance. Yet Washington still says no; the embargo stands; the punishment goes on.
Some things transcend even ‘the virtues of capitalism’, as Norm Lament surely would agree.
October 25, 1991
THE BETRAYAL OF BOSNIA
IF THE BOSNIAN Serbs fail to implement the latest ‘peace plan’, the Americans may still bomb the Balkans, with the British in tow. The last time this alliance took to the air in strength, some 200,000 people were slaughtered, many of them the very ethnic minorities whom President Bush claimed he wished to ‘protect’. The difference now is that even the turkey-shooting generals know they can’t get away with this one. Yet President Clinton – fresh from giving the usual nod to the latest round of Israeli ‘ethnic cleansing’ – believes that Caesar must make a gesture ‘to stop the killing’.
‘Political language,’ wrote George Orwell, ‘is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’ Regardless of what the ‘ethnic cleansers’ have done to their neighbours in former Yugoslavia, Western governments are also guilty; and the renewed threat of American bombing adds a grotesque dimension to an often secret Western policy of dividing Yugoslavia along ethnic lines, dismantling it and eventually recolonising it.
The Balkans have many tragic distinctions. Certainly, if ever a single issue has illuminated the difference between expressions of public morality in the West and the ‘pure wind’ of realpolitik, it is the fate of Bosnia. The semantics of Douglas Hurd are now unacceptable to people watching the Balkan horrors unfold on television. Public opinion has become more than a fleeting force. Having been made witnesses to genocide, perhaps for the first time, people want it stopped. But it can only be stopped if its unstated causes, and the West’s complicity, are understood.
Western governments are not the hand-wringing bystanders they pretend to be. From the beginning, the West has backed the ethnic warlords and neglected the non-sectarian and anti-war citizenry who represent the ideal of Yugoslavia; and for all its flaws, the old federation offered at least nominal constitutional respect to ‘separate identities’ and minority rights. The West’s support for the regime in Croatia and its encouragement of Croatia’s historical fascism is hardly referred to these days; yet Croatia’s president, the Hitler apologist Franjo Tudjman, has been openly courted by Western governments, notably the German government, while his soldiers and surrogates have been murdering thousands of Serbs and ‘cleansing’ their communities, mostly out of sight of the Western media.
Although Serbian forces inflict most casualties now, it was the terrorising and disenfranchising of Serbian minorities in Croatia by Tudjman’s HDZ regime that precipitated the conflict. For every Serbian ‘chetnik’ there is a Croatian ‘ustasha’. It is only since the Croatians have begun to murder large numbers of Muslims in the vicinity of British UN troops that the media spotlight has found them and the full disastrous scale of Western clientism has been revealed.
Tudjman’s regime has been the beneficiary of European intervention, which has been forced by Germany’s new expansionism. Once reunified, Germany began its economic drive east and to dominate Mitteleuropa. ‘It’s our natural market,’ said the chairman of the East Committee, the German industrial group promoting German takeovers in the East. ‘In the end, this market will perhaps bring us to the same position we were in before the first world war. Why not?’44
This ‘natural market’ extended to the northern republics of Yugoslavia – Croatia and Slovenia. During the Second World War, the Nazis
installed a puppet fascist state in Croatia. After the war, half a million Croats moved to Germany, where their émigré organisations enjoy great influence. In 1989, Milovan Djilas warned that ‘In some states [of Europe], for example Austria and Germany, there are influential groups that would like to see Yugoslavia disintegrate – from traditional hatred, from expansionist tendencies and vague, unrealistic desires for revenge.’45
In February 1991, the Council of Europe promoted Germany’s separatist plans by linking economic advantage to the Yugoslav federal government’s ‘restraint’ in dealing with the secessionist movements in Croatia and Slovenia.46 The Tudjman regime was ready for this; violent anti-Serb demonstrations were held in Split, giving a clear signal to Croat and Serb minorities elsewhere to begin fighting for land and their lives.
The EC then compounded this by openly threatening the federal government that future economic assistance would depend on ‘respect for minority rights’. Interpreted in Yugoslavia, this meant that the secessions had tacit EC approval.47 Indeed, once the Yugoslav army had deployed units throughout the country, with the objective of holding the federation together, the EC secretly threatened to cut off $1 billion in promised aid.48
In October 1991, the EC delivered the coup de grâce at a special conference on Yugoslavia at The Hague. Behind a rhetorical veil of reasonableness, ministers gave de facto recognition to the secessions by effectively abolishing Yugoslavia. In its Draft Convention on Yugoslavia, the EC announced that the republics ‘are sovereign and independent with [an] international identity’.49 As a former US ambassador to Yugoslavia, William Zimmerman, told the New Yorker: ‘We discovered later that [German foreign minister] Genscher had been in daily contact with the Croatian foreign minister. He was encouraging the Croats to leave the federation and declare independence, while we and our allies, including the Germans, were trying to fashion a joint approach.’50
Bosnia’s leaders pleaded with the West not to recognise the secessionist states, knowing that both Croats and Serbs would then fall on multi-ethnic Bosnia. They argued that whatever had gone before, the worst could be contained without recognition. They were supported by the Macedonians who said that they, like the Bosnians, would have no choice but to seek independence; and that, in turn, would provoke Serbia. No EC minister sounded a warning or reminded his colleague of what was an open secret in Western capitals: that in March of that year, Tudjman and Slobadan Milosevic, the Serb leader, although despising each other, had conspired to carve up Bosnia between them as soon as the time was right. And international recognition would be that time.
The momentum in Germany for recognition was now well under way. Most of the German media concentrated on Serb atrocities. By the time the European leaders met at Maastricht in December 1991, a deal had been done in all but name.
The deal was that Germany would submerge its most exalted postwar achievement, the Deutschmark, into a common European currency if the German Croatia lobby was given its way on recognition. This was never openly linked to the Maastricht treaty itself; however, brokered by the French, it was a major factor. To put a decent interval between Maastricht and the recognition of Croatia and Slovenia, 15 January 1992 was the date set for the announcement. Two days after the Maastricht conference broke up, on 18 December, Germany broke ranks and recognised Croatia.
No EC government publicly objected to this opportunism. Neither Hurd nor Major said anything. Yet, at a stroke, it made a mockery of European strictures to the developing world on human rights and civilised behaviour. Set against what has happened since in Bosnia, and is likely to happen elsewhere as a result, recognition was an act of breathtaking irresponsibility. The Europeans, wrote Sean Gervasi, ‘turned a manageable internal conflict into appalling fratricide’.51
The West’s role in Yugoslavia’s suffering is not confined to Germany’s fait accompli. The fact that the Bush administration waged economic warfare against Yugoslavia has received little attention, yet the effect on ethnic tensions has been devastating. In 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, pressure was applied by Washington to all the former communist states to follow the ‘market’ model. The usual ‘market reforms’ were demanded, notably privatisation and conditions amenable to Western ‘investment’.
Having already embraced something of a ‘mixed economy’ and being dependent on Western capital transfers, trade and tourism, Yugoslavia had already fallen victim to a ‘market’ recession long before the rest of Europe. Throughout the 1980s, discontent had risen among working people, while those willing to exploit ethnic tensions waited for their opportunity. In 1989, the new federal prime minister, Ante Marcovic, went to Washington and requested $1 billion in loans from the US and $3 billion from the World Bank. When told of the scale of austerity his country would have to accept, he warned that unemployment would increase to 20 per cent and ‘there is the threat of increased ethnic and political tensions . . .’52 The moment the Marcovic Government devalued the currency and began to close ‘unprofitable’ state enterprises and cut public services, 650,000 Serbian workers went on strike and the plan collapsed.53 Yugoslavia was now on its own, denied a fraction of the aid Washington gave to ideologically friendly Poland.
However, ‘economic reforms’ had begun to take hold in separatist republics, as the Germans encouraged Croatia and Slovenia to join the great ‘European market’ and to ‘disassociate’ themselves from Yugoslavia. The federation, noted Gervasi, had ‘walked a tightrope through the 1980s until economic and political crisis, particularly the fall in the standard of living, broke its balance. As rival ethnic groups shook the rope and the state teetered, EC intervention helped push [it] into the abyss . . .’54
When the Western allies recognised Bosnia in 1992, there was no acknowledgement that Bosnia’s pluralism did not spring from some imagined independent state but from a federal unit that was an integral part of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia.55 Moreover, the date chosen for recognition was the anniversary of the Nazi bombing of Serbia – a day when Serbs renew their cherished self-image of heroic resistance against impossible odds. In Serb nationalist eyes, here was the West partitioning their homeland, having not long celebrated the end of the partition of Germany. And now here was the Luftwaffe choosing the skies over Bosnia for its first military operation since the Second World War. With such disregard for national sensitivity, the West has smoothed the way for rabid nationalism to exploit a past shared by decent people and for the Serbian peace movement to be condemned as ‘unpatriotic’.
In Russia, with its close ties to Serbia, the spectacle of NATO forces, with German participation, bombing Serbian targets, killing and maiming Serbian women and children, might well have the kind of reaction that not even Boris Yeltsin, the West’s man, could stop. The First World War began, after all, in Sarajevo.
Even belated attempts by the EC to deter the extremists promoting ‘Greater Serbia’ have been botched; the policing of sanctions was considered farcical until recently. And if sanctions are applied to Serbia, why are they not also applied to Croatia? Ask any British soldier who has to carry the incinerated corpses of the victims of Croatian fascism. That the multi-ethnic Bosnians, especially those in the towns who have demonstrated no desire to attack anybody, should have been denied the means of defending themselves is absurd, and wrong. They stand defenceless not only against Serbs, whose arms supplies are assured, but against Croats, who through extensive émigré connections and powerful foreign friends, continue to move large shipments of weapons from Austria, Slovenia and Hungary.56
Just as I believe the Cambodian people should have arms in order to resist the Khmer Rouge, so the Bosnians should have arms to resist those who would visit a version of ‘Year Zero’ upon them; and they are up against fascism on two fronts. Breaking the Bosnian sieges with massive humanitarian aid is essential; the use of force worse than useless. One turkey shooter could ignite the rest of the Balkan tinderbox. The painful moral and practical dilemmas faced in the region, scarred by the legacies of competing
empires, are not solved by Western so-called statesmen, offering ‘peace plans’ that further provoke and divide, and who seldom see the results of their culpability.
May 7, 1993
OPERATION RESTORE HOPE
ON CHRISTMAS EVE 1992, BBC television news announced that America’s ‘only purpose’ in Somalia was to ensure that hungry people were fed. This was generally agreed throughout the media on both sides of the Atlantic. Congratulations were offered to President Bush for his ‘bold’ decision to ‘send the cavalry to the rescue’. Time magazine published a two-page colour photograph showing Somali children reaching out to a marine for ‘the gift of hope’. A marine corporal was asked about the danger he faced. ‘In a way,’ he said wistfully, ‘I’m sort of hoping for a little combat.’57
Within days of their arrival, two US helicopter gunships fired their missiles at three armed vehicles, killing all nine Somalis in them. The justification for this ‘little combat’ was that the helicopters had been attacked. In fact, the Somalis were engaged in a private fight, and, according to witnesses, no one fired at the helicopters.
The nine dead equals the number of British soldiers killed by US aircraft during the Gulf War. The difference is that, while the British incident became a much-publicised scandal, the Somali incident barely rated a mention. Last week, on the eve of Bush’s triumphant arrival in Somalia, US helicopters dropped leaflets warning people that if they were found merely carrying a weapon they would be shot. Many of the weapons were supplied originally by Washington; no irony was noted.
Operation Restore Hope, as this model of media manipulation is called, is not just a public relations stunt staged by a beaten and discredited president who, in the wake of his ‘bold’ decision on Somalia, pardoned those who almost certainly would have blown the whistle on his role in the Iran-Contra crimes. Bush is not engaged in a humanitarian mission to restore hope to the starving. He has sent guns and bombs to skeletal children to restore order: the ‘new world order’. It took a lone letter writer to the Guardian, Andy Abel, to state the obvious, which professional commentators apparently could not. ‘We are invited’, he wrote, ‘to believe that there is starvation in Somalia because armed gangs loot food stocks. There is looting because there is not enough food.’58