Distant Voices (28 page)

The World Bank usually holds its annual conference in Washington. The last conference held in Asia was in Manila in 1976 soon after the IMF had given the dictator Ferdinand Marcos $4.5 billion, or about a third of the amount he is now believed to have had stashed away when he died.
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In return for this largesse, Marcos built a number of luxury hotels to accommodate the World Bankers in the manner to which they are accustomed when deliberating about the poor. The poor, of course, were kept well away. Marcos sent the bill to the city authorities, who passed it on in municipal taxes; the poor of Manila are still paying it off.

Something similar has happened here. A vast conference centre, with gilded lacquer and other adornments, was completed just in time for the conference, and at great cost. In a country where rural children still die from malnutrition and preventable disease, and where low wages, bonded child labour, prostitution and illegal sweatshops support a ‘growing' economy, the poor will end up paying indirectly.

The display of wealth has been unrelenting. A three-star chef has been flown in from Paris, reported the Bangkok
Nation
, accompanied by ‘succulent turkeys from the famous Bresse region . . . Belgian caviar from Iran, smoked salmon from Norway and prime rib from the US'.
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Following the seminar on the conversion of socialism to capitalism and ‘the lessons learned', delegates headed off to a party where, said the
Nation
, ‘they must have been surprised and delighted that something very appropriate to their status was in store for them . . . a display of gems consisting of an 89-karat diamond, a 100-karat emerald and a 336-karat opal.'
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‘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.'
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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.
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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.'
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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.'
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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.
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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.'
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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

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?'
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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.'
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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'.
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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.'
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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'.
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