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 god
forsaken, writhing rump of a country.
And not only there.
In Russia, billions (3 to 5) were transferred to secret off
shore bank accounts to be "portfolio managed" by
mysterious fly-by-night entities. 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 Thessaloniki,
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 class 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-facely 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 cocktail 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 institutions, 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 pass for
regimes in these parts of the planet - and the unilateral
institutions that pass for multilateral ones in the rest of it.
An elaborate system of winks and nods, the sign language
of institutional 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 institutions and corrupt regimes -
robbed their constituencies 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 effected 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 ceasars - 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 amassed, the dies are cast and more
people cast to die.