In 2001, the most unusual event has gone unnoticed in the
international press. A former minister of finance has
accused the more prominent members of the diplomatic
corps in his country of corruption. He insisted that these
paragons of indignant righteousness and hectoring
morality have tried to blackmail him into paying them
hefty commissions from money allotted to exigent
humanitarian aid. This was immediately and from afar -
and, therefore, without proper investigation - denied by
their superiors in no uncertain terms.
The facts are these: most (though by no means all)
Western diplomats in the nightmarish wasteland that is
East Europe and the Balkan, the unctuously fulsome and
the frowzily wizened alike, are ageing and sybaritic basket
cases. They have often failed miserably in their bootless
previous posts - or have insufficiently submerged in the
Byzantine culture of their employers. Thus emotionally
injured and cast into the frigorific outer darkness of a
ravaged continent, they adopt the imperial patina of
Roman procurators in narcissistic compensation. Their
long suffering wives - bored to distraction in the
impassibly catatonic societies of post communism -
impose upon a reluctant and flummoxed population the
nescient folderol of their distaff voluntary urges or
exiguous artistic talents. Ever more crapulous, they
aestivate and hibernate, the queens of tatty courts and
shabby courtiers.
The cold war having ebbed, these emissaries of
questionable provenance engage in the promotion of the
narrow interests of specific industries or companies. They
lobby the local administration, deploying bare threats and
obloquies where veiled charm fails. They exert subtle or
brutal pressure through the press. They co-opt name-
dropping bureaucrats and bribe pivotal politicians. They
get fired those who won't collaborate or threaten to expose
their less defensible misdeeds. They are glorified delivery
boys, carrying apocryphal messages to and fro. They are
bloviating PR campaigners, seeking to aggrandize their
meagre role and, incidentally, that of their country. They
wine and dine and banter endlessly with the provincial
somnolent variety of public figures, members of the venal
and pinchbeck elites that now rule these tortured
territories. In short - forced to deal with the bedizened
miscreants that pass for businessmen and politicians in
this nether world - they are transformed, assuming in the
process the identity of their obdurately corrupted hosts.
Thus, they help to sway elections and hasten to endorse
their results, however disputed and patently fraudulent.
They intimidate the opposition, negotiate with
businessmen, prod favoured politicians, spread roorbacks
and perambulate their fiefdom to gather intelligence.
More often than not, they cross the limpid lines between
promotion and extortion, lagniappe and pelf, friendship
and collusion, diplomacy and protectorate, the kosher and
the criminal.
They are the target and the address of a legion of
pressures and demands. Their government may ask them
to help depose one coalition and help install another.
Their secret services - disguised as intrusive NGOs or
workers at the embassy - often get them involved in shady
acts and unscrupulous practices. Real NGOs ask for their
assiduous assistance and protection. Their hosts - and
centuries old protocol - expect them to surreptitiously
provide support while openly refrain from intervening,
maintaining equipoise. Other countries protest, compete,
or leak damaging reports to an often hostile media. The
torpid common folk resent them for their colonial ways
and hypocritical demarches. Lacking compunction, they
are nobody's favourites and everybody's scapegoats at one
time or another.
And they are ill-equipped to deal with these subtleties.
Not of intelligence, they end where they now are and wish
they weren't. Ignorant of business and entrepreneurship,
they occupy the dead end, otiose and pension-orientated
jobs they do. Devoid of the charm, negotiating skills and
human relations required by the intricacies of their
profession - they are relegated to the Augean outskirts of
civilization. Dishonest and mountebank, they persist in
their mortifying positions, inured to the conniving they
require.
This blatantly discernible ineptitude provokes the
"natives" into a wholesale rejection of the West, its values
and its culture. The envoys are perceived as the cormorant
reification of their remote controllers. Their voluptuary
decadence is a distant echo of the West's decay, their
nonage greed - a shadow of its avarice, their effrontery
and hidebound peremptory nature - its mien. They are in
no position to preach or teach.
The diplomats of the West are not evil. Some of them
mean well. To the best of their oft limited abilities, they
cadge and beg and press and convince their governments
to show goodwill and to contribute to their hosts. But soon
their mettle is desiccated by the vexatious realities of their
new habitation. Reduced to susurrus cynicism and
sardonic contempt, they perfunctorily perform their
functions, a distant look in their now empty eyes. They
have been assimilated, rendered useless to their
dispatchers and to their hosts alike.