After the Rain : how the West lost the East
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Title: After the Rain : how the West lost the East
Author: Samuel Vaknin
Editor: Lidija Rangelovska
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Most recently updated: April 18, 2023
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AFTER THE RAIN : HOW THE WEST LOST THE EAST ***
After the Rain
How the West
Lost the East
1st EDITION
Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.
Editing and Design:
Lidija Rangelovska
Lidija Rangelovska
A Narcissus Publications Imprint, Skopje 2001
Published in association with Central Europe Review and
Central and East European New Media Initiative
(c) 2000 Copyright Lidija Rangelovska.
All rights reserved. This book, or any part thereof, may not be used or
reproduced in any manner without written permission from:
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Created by: LIDIJA RANGELOVSKA
REPUBLIC OF MACEDONIA
C O N T E N T S
I n t r o d u c t i o n
The P E O P L E
The Author of this Article is a Racist
The Cavemen and the Alien
Is Transition Possible?
Can Socialist Professors of Economics Teach Capitalism?
The Poets and the Eclipse
The Rip van Winkle Institutions
Inside, Outside - Diasporas and Modern States
The Magla Vocables
The Elders of Zion
The Last Family
Rasputin in Transition
The Honorary Academic
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
Who is Guarding the Guards?
Herzl's Butlers
The Phlegm and the Anima
An Impressionistic Canvass
The Dance of Jael
Homo Balkanus
The MinMaj Rule
The Balkans between Omerta and Vendetta
On the Criminality of Transition
The Myth of Great Albania
The Bad Blood of Kosovo
The Plight of the Kosovar
The Black Birds of Kosova
The Onset of Cultural Imperialism
The Defrosted War
Russia's Role in a Brave, New World
The Bones of the Grenadier
Endgame in the Balkans
Millenarian Thoughts about Kosovo
NATO's Next War
Why did Milosevic Surrender?
The Deadly Antlers
NATO, the EU and the New Kids on the Block
The Treasure Trove of Kosovo
Lucky Macedonia or Macedonia's Serendipity
The Good Fortune of Neighbouring a Human Catastrophe
Black Magic, White Magic - Managing our Future
The Friendly Club
The Books of the Damned
The PCM Trail
The Mind of Darkness
The E C O N O M Y
Central Europe - The New Colonies
New Paradigms, Old Cycles
Lessons in Transition
Lucky Russia
Russian Roulette
Foreigners do not Like Russia
Russia's New Economy
IMF - Kill or Cure
The IMF Deconstructed
Financial Crisis, Global Capital Flows and the International Financial
Architecture
The Shadowy World of International Finance
The Typology of Financial Scandals
The Revolt of the Poor
The Demise of Intellectual Property
Scavenger Economies, Predator Economies
Market Impeders and Market Inefficiencies
Public Procurement and very Private Benefits
Liquidity or Liquidation
The Predicament of the Newly Rich
The Solow Paradox
E p I l o g u e
The A u t h o r
I N T R O D U C T I O N
This is a series of articles written and published in 1996-2000 in
Macedonia, in Russia, in Egypt and in the Czech Republic.
How the West lost the East. The economics, the politics, the
geopolitics, the conspiracies, the corruption, the old and the new, the
plough and the internet - it is all here, in prose, as provocative and
vitriolic and loving and longing as I could make it.
From "The Mind of Darkness":
"'The Balkans' - I say - 'is the unconscious of the world'. People stop
to digest this metaphor and then they nod enthusiastically. It is here
that the repressed memories of history, its traumas and fears and
images reside. It is here that the psychodynamics of humanity - the
tectonic clash between Rome and Byzantium, West and East,
Judeo-Christianity and Islam - is still easily discernible. We are
seated at a New Year's dining table, loaded with a roasted pig and
exotic salads.
I, the Jew, only half foreign to this cradle of Slavonics. Four Serbs,
five Macedonians. It is in the Balkans that all ethnic distinctions
fail and it is here that they prevail anachronistically and
atavistically. Contradiction and change the only two fixtures of this
tormented region.
The women of the Balkan - buried under provocative mask-like make up,
retro hairstyles and too narrow dresses. The men, clad in sepia
colours, old fashioned suits and turn of the century moustaches. In the
background there is the crying game that is Balkanian music: liturgy
and folk and elegy combined. The smells are heavy with musk-ular
perfumes. It is like time travel. It is like revisiting one's
childhood."
How were the articles and essays contained herein - many of them
translated and published in local languages - received by people
everywhere?
My readers from the Balkans reacted to these essays with an admixture
of rage and indignation. They erected defensive barricades of
self-aggrandizement and of my devaluation. And they let their ingrained
paranoia run rampant (Jewish conspiracies, Western spies, world plots).
I asked a resident of this tortured region to write the foreword to
this book. People from other parts, from Central and Eastern Europe,
were more argumentative and contemplating, though much less passionate.
And Westerners - especially those with interest in these regions of the
world - reacted with great, cathartic enthusiasm.
In reading this book, I wish upon you the joy and the revulsion, the
dark fascination of this region and its surrealist dreams and
nightmares. This is what I experience daily here and it is my hope that
I succeeded to convey the siren's song, the honeyed trap, the lure and
the allure of this tortured corner of the earth.
Dr. Sam Vaknin
Skopje, February 2000
Return
After the Rain
How the West
Lost the East
The PEOPLE
The Author of this Article is a Racist
Or, so say many of the readers, who react vehemently - not to say
minaciously - to my articles. They insist that I demonise, chastise,
disparage, deride and hold in contempt groups of people simply and
solely because they are born in a given geographical area or are of a
given genetic stock. Few stop sufficiently long to notice that the
above two accusations contravene each other. A territory as vast as CEE
cannot and is not inhabited by one "race". It is an historical cocktail
of colours and origins and languages and bloodlines. Disregarding the
pan-Slavic myth for a minute, a racist would find the CEE a very
discouraging neighbourhood.
Am I a racist? If this is taken to mean "do I believe in the inherent
inferiority or malevolence or impurity of any group of people (however
arbitrarily defined or capriciously delimited) just because of their
common origin or habitation" - then of course I am not. I am not an
adherent of genetic predetermination and I think that there is very
little point in discussing fictitious entities such as "pure races".
That people are what they are made out to be by their up-bringing,
society, and history and by the reactions of other humans to them - is
what I subscribe to.
Yet I do believe in the temporary inferiority, malevolence and impurity
of groups of people who experienced and were subjected to prolonged
corrupting and pathologising influences. Historical processes exact an
exorbitant toll. Ideologies, indoctrination, totalitarianism,
authoritarianism, command economies, statism, militarism, malignant
nationalism, occupation - all carry a hefty price tag. And the currency
is the mind of the people: their mental health, their socialization
processes and, ultimately, the social fabric. Beneath a thin veneer of
kultur - the masses were savaged, the individual was crushed into a
moral pulp. I do believe in mass pathology: mass hysteria, mass
personality disorders, mass psychoses. I do believe in common
depravity, all-pervasive venality and inescapable subornation of whole
societies and of each of the individuals who comprise them. I do
believe in the osmosis of evil, in the diffusion of villainy, in the
corruption of the soul. In short: I do believe in terminally sick
societies, whose prospects of recovery are nil. The only hope lies in
their demise. Not in the abstract sense of the word - but in the actual
death and decomposition of each and every individual until the whole
"generation of the desert" is done with and a new, less contaminated
one, emerges to take its place.
This is why I believe that the future of Africa, the Middle East and
the countries of the CEE and NIS is, for the time being, behind them.
Their horizon is dim and empty. They are looking forward to the past.
They are the zombies of the international arena, the walking dead and
it is death that they multiply. Their growth is stunted, their speech
is stifled, their leaders a vicious lot, the states that they inhabit
are dens of barbarous criminality and lawlessness. Their institutions
are a travesty, their parties nests of avarice and vile. Their media
prostituted and defiled. The farce of elections and the newspeak of
democracy and human rights and freemarketry are props to hide the vast
wilderness of moral bankruptcy. These are Potemkin states run by
Chicago mobs. Instruments of extortion and coercion no different to
their predecessors - only they provide less security, both physical and
economic. They know no different. They think no different. They swear
by their malaise and by their malaise they shall die.
And die they shall. The signs are auspicious. Biology, the West and
international financial institutions all conspire to retire the beast.
New blood, new ideas, new hopes and aspirations are in evidence. Still
overwhelmed by the abrupt and cruel exposure of their elders, still
taken aback by the enormity of the project of rehabilitating the very
psyche of their people, still torn between illegal self enrichment and
service to their fellow citizens - but there they are, the young ones.
The battle is on. The consensus of the baksheesh and the political
assassination is replaced, ever so gradually, by the dissension of the
market place. Wars are fought with spreadsheets, experience imported
from afar, new knowledge craved, corruption decried. It is a
refreshing, gargantuan, change. And it will consume yet one more
generation. But it has started and it is irreversible. And it is in the
eyes of the youth, a flickering flame, so ephemeral, so vulnerable and
yet, so irresistible. This flame is called the future.
(Article written on January 15, 2000 and published January 31, 2000
in "Central Europe Review" volume 2, issue 4)
Return
The Caveman and the Alien
"'Life' must be curious, alert, erudite and moral, but it must achieve
this without being holier-than-thou, a cynic, a know-it-all or a
Peeping Tom."
(Edward K. Thompson, managing editor of "Life", 1949-1961)
When Chancellor Kohl's party and Edith Cresson are suspected of gross
corruption - these are labelled "aberrations" in an otherwise honest
West. When NASA in collaboration with its UK counterpart blow a 130
million US dollars spacecraft to smithereens having confused the metric
system for its pound/feet archaic predecessor - people nod their head
in disapproval: "accidents happen". When President Clinton appoints his
wife to suggest an overhaul of the multi-hundred billion dollars US
health system - no one thinks it odd. And when the (talented) son of
the police investigated, rumoured to be hyper-corrupt Minister of
Interior Affairs of Israel becomes a Minister himself, no one bats an
eyelash. Yet, when identical events happen in the decrepit countries of
Eastern, Central, or Southern Europe - they are subjected to heaps of
excoriating scorn, to vitriolic diatribes, to condescending preaching,
or to sanctions. It is, indeed, a double standard, a hypocrisy and a
travesty the magnitude of which is rarely to be encountered in the
annals of human pretensions to morality.
The West has grossly and thoroughly violated Thompson's edict. In its
oft-interrupted intercourse with these forsaken regions of the globe,
it has acted, alternately, as a Peeping Tom, a cynic and a know it all.
It has invariably behaved as if it were holier-than-thou. In an
unmitigated and fantastic succession of blunders, miscalculations, vain
promises, unkept threats and unkempt diplomats - it has driven Europe
to the verge of war and the region it "adopted" to the verge of
economic and social upheaval.
Enamoured with the new ideology of free marketry cum democracy, the
West first assumed the role of the omniscient. It designed ingenious
models, devised foolproof laws, imposed fail-safe institutions and
strongly "recommended" measures. Its representatives, the tribunes of
the West, ruled the plebeian East with determination rarely equalled by
skill or knowledge. Velvet hands couched in iron gloves, ignorance
disguised by economic newspeak, geostrategic interests masquerading as
forms of government characterized their dealings with the natives.
Preaching and beseeching from ever-higher pulpits, they poured
opprobrium and sweet delusions on the eagerly deluded, naive,
bewildered masses. The deceit was evident to the indigenous cynics -
but it was the failure that dissuaded them and all else. The West lost
Eastern and Southeast Europe not when it lied egregiously, not when it
pretended to know for sure when it surely did not know, not when it
manipulated and coaxed and coerced - but when it failed. To the peoples
of these regions, the king was fully dressed. It was not a little child
but an enormous debacle that exposed his nudity. In its
presumptuousness and pretentiousness, feigned surety and vain clichés,
imported models and exported cheap raw materials - the West succeeded
to demolish beyond reconstruction whole economies, to ravage
communities, to bring ruination upon the centuries-old social fabric,
woven diligently by generations. It brought crime and drugs and mayhem
but gave very little in return, only a horizon beclouded and thundering
with eloquence. As a result, while tottering regional governments still
pay lip service to the Euro-Atlantic structures, the masses are enraged
and restless and rebellious and baleful and anti-Western to the core.
They are not likely to acquiesce much longer - not with the West's
neo-colonialism but with its incompetence and inaptitude, with the
nonchalant experimentation that it imposed upon them and with the abyss
between its proclamations and its performance.
In all this time, the envoys of the West - its mediocre politicians,
its insatiably ruthless media, its obese tourists and its armchair
economists - continued to play the role of God, wreaking greater havoc
than even the original. While knowing it all in advance (in breach of
every tradition scientific), they also developed a kind of world weary,
unshaven cynicism interlaced with fascination at the depths plumbed by
the local's immorality and amorality. The jet-set Peeping Toms resided
in five star hotels (or luxurious apartments) overlooking the communist
shantytowns, drove utility vehicles to the shabby offices of the native
bureaucrats and dined in $100 per meal restaurants ("it's so cheap
here"). In between sushi and sake they bemoaned and grieved over
corruption and nepotism and cronyism ("I simply love their ethnic food,
but they are so..."). They mourned the autochtonal inability to act
decisively, to cut red tape, to manufacture quality, to open to the
world, to be less xenophobic (while casting a disdainful glance at the
sweaty waiter). To them it looked like an ancient natural phenomenon, a
force of nature, an inevitability and hence their cynicism. Mostly
provincial people with horizons limited by consumption and by wealth,
they adopted cynicism as shorthand for cosmopolitanism. They
erroneously believed it lent them an air of ruggedness and rich
experience and the virile aroma of decadent erudition. Yet all it did
is make them obnoxious and more repellent to the residents than they
already were.
Ever the preachers, the West - both Europeans and Americans - upheld
themselves as role models of virtue to be emulated, as points of
reference, almost inhuman or superhuman in their taming of the vices,
avarice up front. Yet the disorder in their own homes was broadcast
live, day in and day out, into the cubicles inhabited by the very
people they sought to so transform. And they conspired and collaborated
in all manner of corruption and crime and scam and rigged elections in
all the countries they put the gospel to. In trying to put an end to
history, they seem to have provoked another round of it - more vicious,
more enduring, more traumatic than before. That the West will pay the
price for its mistakes I have no doubt. For isn't it a part and parcel
of their teaching that everything has a price and that there is always
a time of reckoning?
(Article written on November 23, 1999 and published December 6, 1999
in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 24)
Return
Is Transition Possible?
Can Socialist Professors of Economics
Teach Capitalism?
Lest you hold your breath to the end of this article - the answers to
both questions in the title are no and no. Capitalism cannot be
"learned" or "imported" or "emulated" or "simulated". Capitalism (or,
rather, liberalism) is not only a theoretical construct. It is not only
a body of knowledge. It is a philosophy, an ideology, a way of life, a
mentality and a personality.
This is why professors of economics who studied under Socialism can
never teach Capitalism in the truest sense of the word. No matter how
intelligent and knowledgeable (and a minority of them are) - they can
never convey the experience, the practice, the instincts and reflexes,
the emotional hues and intellectual pugilistics that real, full scale,
full-blooded Capitalism entails. They are intellectually and
emotionally castrated by their socialist past of close complicity with
inefficiency, corruption and pathological economic thinking.
This is why workers and managers inherited from the socialist-communist
period can never function properly in a Capitalist ambience. Both were
trained at civil disobedience through looting their own state and
factories. Both grew accustomed to state handouts and bribes disguised
as entitlements were suspicious and envious at their own elites
(especially their politicians and crony professors), victims to
suppressed rage and open, helpless and degrading dependence. Such
workers and managers - no matter how well intentioned and well
qualified or skilled - are likely to sabotage the very efforts whose
livelihood depends on.
When the transition period of post-communist economies started,
academics, journalists and politicians in the West talked about the
"pent up energies" of the masses, now to be released through the twin
processes of privatisation and democratisation. This metaphor of humans
as capitalistically charged batteries waiting to unleash their stored
energy upon their lands - was realistic enough. People were, indeed,
charged: with pathological envy, with rage, with sadism, with
pusillanimity, with urges to sabotage, to steal, and to pilfer. A
tsunami of destruction, a tidal wave of misappropriation, an orgy of
crime and corruption and nepotism and cronyism swept across the
unfortunate territories of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Transition
was perceived by the many either as a new venue for avenging the past
and for visiting the wrath of the masses upon the heads of the elites -
or as another, accelerated, mode of stripping the state naked of all
its assets. Finally, the latter propensity prevailed. The old elites
used the cover of transition to enrich themselves and their cronies,
this time "transparently" and "legally". The result was a repulsive
malignant metastasis of capitalism, devoid of the liberal ideals or
practices, denuded of ethics, floating in a space free of functioning,
trusted institutions.
While the masses and their elites in CEE were busy scavenging, the West
engaged in impotent debate between a school of "shock therapists" and a
school of "institution builders". The former believed that appearances
will create reality and that reality will alter consciousness (sounds
like Marxism to me). Rapid privatisation will generate a class of
instant capitalists who, in turn, will usher in an era of real,
multi-dimensional liberalism. The latter believed that the good wine of
Capitalism could be poured only to the functioning receptacles of
liberalism. They advocated much longer transition periods in which
privatisation will come only after the proper institutions were
erected. Both indulged in a form of central planning. IMF-ism replaced
Communism. The international financial institutions and their hordes of
well-paid, well-accommodated experts - replaced the Central Committee
of the party. Washington replaced Moscow. It was all very familiar and
cosy.
Ever the adapters, the former communist elites converted to ardent
capitalism. With the fervour with which they recited Marxist slogans in
their past - they chanted capitalist sobriquets in the present. It was
catechism, uttered soullessly, in an alien language, in the marble
cathedrals of capitalism in London and Washington. There was commitment
or conviction behind it and it was tainted by organized crime and
all-pervasive corruption. The West was the new regime to be suckered
and looted and pillaged and drained. The deal was simple: mumble the
mantras of the West, establish Potemkin institutions, keep peace and
order in your corner of the world, give the West strategic access to
your territory. In return the West will turn a blind eye to the worst
excesses and to worse than excesses. This was the deal struck in Russia
with the "reformists", in Yugoslavia with Milosevic, the "peacemaker",
in the Czech Republic with Klaus the "economic magician" of Central
Europe. It was communism all over: a superpower buying influence and
colluding with corrupt elites to rob their own nations blind.
It could have been different.
Post-war Japan and Germany are two examples of the right kind of
reconstruction and reforms. Democracy took real root in these two
former military regimes. Economic prosperity was long lived because
democracy took hold. And the ever tenuous, ever important trust between
the citizens and their rulers and among themselves was thus enhanced.
Trust is really the crux of the matter. Economy is called the dismal
science because it pretends to be one, disguising its uncertainties and
shifting fashions with mathematical formulae. Economy describes the
aggregate behaviour of humans and, in this restricted sense, it is a
branch of psychology. People operate within a marketplace and attach
values to their goods and services and to their inputs (work, capital,
natural endowments) through the price mechanism. This elaborate
construct, however, depends greatly on trust. If people were not to
trust each other and/or the economic framework (within which they
interact) - economic activities would have gradually ground to a halt.
A clear inverse relationship exists between the general trust level and
the level of economic activity. There are four major types of trust:
a. Trust related to Intent - the market players assume that other
players are (generally) rational, that they have intentions, that these
intentions conform to the maximization of benefits and that people are
likely to act on their intentions;
b. Trust related to Liquidity - the market players assume that
other players possess or have access, or will possess, or will have
access to the liquid means needed in order to materialize their
intentions and that - barring force majeure - this liquidity is the
driving force behind the formation of these intentions. People in
possession of liquidity wish to maximize the returns on their money and
are driven to economically transact;
c. Trust related to knowledge and ability - the market players
assume that other players possess or have access to, or will possess,
or will have access to the know-how, technology and intellectual
property and wherewithal necessary to materialize their intention (and,
by implication, the transactions that they enter into). Another
assumption is that all the players are "enabled": physically, mentally,
legally and financially available and capable to perform their parts as
agreed between the players in each and every particular transaction. A
hidden assumption is that the players evaluate themselves properly:
that they know their strengths and weaknesses, that they have a
balanced picture of themselves and realistic set of expectations,
self-esteem and self-confidence to support that worldview (including a
matching track record). Some allowance is made for "game theory"
tactics: exaggeration, disinformation, even outright deception - but
this allowance should not overshadow the merits of the transaction and
its inherent sincerity;
d. Trust related to the Economic horizon and context - the market
players assume that the market will continue to exist as an inert
system, unhindered by external factors (governments, geopolitics,
global crises, changes in accounting policies, hyperinflation, new
taxation - anything that could deflect the trajectory of the market).
They, therefore, have an "investment or economic horizon" to look
forward to and upon which they can base their decisions. They also have
cultural, legal, technological and political contexts within which to
operate. The underlying assumptions of stability are very much akin to
the idealized models that scientists study in the accurate sciences
(indeed, in economy as well).
When one or more of these basic building blocks of trust is fractured
that the whole edifice of the market crumbles. Fragmentation ensues,
more social and psychological than economic in nature. This is very
typical of poor countries with great social and economic polarization.
It is also very typical of countries "in transition" (a polite way to
describe a state of total shock and confusion). People adopt several
reaction patterns to the breakdown in trust:
a. Avoidance and isolation - they avoid contact with other people
and adopt reclusive behaviour. The number of voluntary interactions
decreases sharply;
b. Corruption - People prefer shortcuts to economic benefits
because of the collapse of the horizon trust (=they see no long term
future and even doubt the very continued existence of the system);
c. Crime - Criminal activity increases;
d. Fantastic and Grandiose delusions to compensate for a growing
sense of uncertainty and fear and for a complex of inferiority. This
nagging feeling of inferiority is the result of the internalisation of
the image of the people in their own eyes and in the eyes of others.
This is a self-reinforcing mechanism (vicious circle). The results are
under-confidence and a handicapped sense of self-esteem. The latter
undulates and fluctuates from overvaluation of one's self and others to
devaluation of both;
e. Hypermobility - People are not loyal to the economic cells
within which they function. They switch a lot of jobs, for instance, or
ignore contracts that they made. The concepts of exclusivity, the
sanctity of promises, loyalty, future, and a career path - all get
eroded. As a result, there is no investment in the future (in the
acquisition of skills or in long term investments, to give but two
examples);
f. Cognitive Dissonance - The collapse of the social and economic
systems adversely affects the individual. One of the classic defence
mechanisms is the cognitive dissonance. The person involved tells
himself that he really chose and wanted his way of life, his decrepit
environment, his low standard of living, etc. ("We are poor because we
chose not to be like the inhuman West");
g. The Pathological Envy - The Cognitive Dissonance is often
coupled with a pathological envy (as opposed to benign jealousy). This
is a destructive type of envy, which seeks to deprive others of their
successes and possessions. It is very typical of societies with a
grossly unequal distribution of wealth;
h. The Mentality (or the Historical) Defences - these are defence
mechanisms, which make use of an imagined mentality problem ("we are
like that, we have been like this for ages now, nothing to do, we are
deformed") - or build upon some historical pattern, or invented pattern
("we have been enslaved and submissive for five centuries - what can
you expect");
i. The Passive-Aggressive reaction: occurs mainly when the market
players have no access to more legitimate and aggressive venues of
reacting to their predicament or when they are predisposed to
suppressing of aggression (or when they elect to not express it). The
passive-aggressive reactions are "sabotage"-type reactions: slowing
down of the work, "working by the book", absenteeism, stealing from the
workplace, fostering and maintaining bureaucratic procedures and so on;
j. The inability to postpone satisfaction - The players regress to
a child-like state, demanding immediate satisfaction, unable to
postpone it and getting frustrated, aggressive and deceiving if they
are required to do so by circumstances. They engage in short term
activities, some criminal, some dubious, some legitimate: trading and
speculation, gambling, short-termism.
The results are, usually, catastrophic: A reduction in economic
activity, in the number of interactions and in the field of economic
potentials (the product of all possible economic transactions). An
erosion of the human capital, its skills and availability. Brain drain
- skilled people desert, en masse, the fragmented economic system and
move to more sustainable ones. Resort to illegal and to extra-legal
activities Social and economic polarization. Interethnic tensions and
tensions between the very rich and the very poor tend to erupt and to
explode.
And this is where most countries in transition are at right now. To a
large extent, it is the fault of their elites. Providing orientation
and guidance is supposed to be their function and why society invests
in them. But the elites in all countries in transition - tainted by
long years of complicity in the unseemly and the criminal - never
exerted moral or intellectual authority over their people. At the risk
of sounding narcissistic, allow me to quote myself (from "The Poets and
the Eclipse"). Replace "intellectuals of the Balkan" with
"intellectuals of the countries in transition":
(Article written on October 31, 1999 and published November 15, 1999
in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 21)
Return
The Poets and the Eclipse
Poets in Somalia hold an inordinate sway over the indigenous
population. They sing the praises of war with the same alacrity and
vehemence that they invest in glorifying peace. And the population
listens and follows these dark skinned pied pipers. Lately, they have
been extolling peace and peace prevails in Somaliland and the other
state-like enclaves in this tortured shadow of a country.
In the evening we celebrate a birthday party under deciduous trees, in
floodlit darkness, somewhere in the Balkans. The voices of industrious
crickets, of late chirping birds, of the cesma - the fabled Balkan
water fountain - all intermingle to produce an auditory magic. A famous
satirist and poet catapults slurred, vitriolic diatribes at a guest
from the West that I brought with me. His words ring inebriatedly
authentic. He need not learn the language, he exclaims, of people
without a spirit and without a mind. He is referring to English. His
country - he triumphantly shrills - is the best, an island of
civilization among the barbarians at the gates. He enumerates his
neighbours and proceeds to describe in vivid, gut wrenching detail what
he would do to them all, given the opportunity. "The rotten core of our
national apple" - a melancholy contribution from a professor of
psychiatry.
Another day. As the moon bit into the otherwise scorching sun - the
streets emptied. Shops closed, the traffic halted, workers remained
cooped up in steamy offices. Why all this - I asked my friend. He is a
leading journalist, an author, an editor and a media personality. He
looked at me warily and proceeded to expound upon the health risks
entailed in being exposed to the eclipse. He was serious as was
evidenced by his subsequent descent into his basement and by the
resounding bolting of the anti-nuclear double plated armoured door. He
offered me to join him and was appalled to hear that I had every
intention of watching the eclipse - and from the street.
The intellectuals of the Balkans - a curse, not in disguise, a
nefarious presence, ominous, erratic and corrupt. Sometimes, at the
nucleus of all conflict and mayhem - at other times (of ethnic
cleansing or suppression of the media) conspicuously absent. Zeligs of
umpteen disguises and ever changing, shimmering loyalties.
They exert no moderating, countervailing influence - on the contrary,
they radicalise, dramatize, poison and incite. Intellectuals are
prominent among all the nationalist parties in the Balkans - and rare
among the scant centre parties that have recently sprung out of the
ashes of communism.
They do not disseminate the little, outdated knowledge that they do
possess. Rather they keep it as a guild would, unto themselves,
jealously. In the vanity typical of the insecure, they abnegate all
foreign knowledge. They rarely know a second language sufficiently to
read it. They promote their brand of degreed ignorance with religious
zeal and punish all transgressors with fierceness and ruthlessness.
They are the main barriers to technology transfers and knowledge
enhancement in this wretched region. Their instincts of
self-preservation go against the best interests of their people. Unable
to educate and teach - they prostitute their services, selling degrees
or corrupting themselves in politics. They make up a big part of the
post communist nomenclature as they have a big part of the communist
one. The result is economics students who never heard of Milton
Friedman or Kenneth Arrow and students of medicine who offer sex or
money or both to their professors in order to graduate.
Thus, instead of advocating and promoting freedom and liberalization -
they concentrate on the mechanisms of control, on manipulating the worn
levers of power. They are the dishonest brokers of corrupted
politicians and their businessmen cronies. They are heavily involved -
oft times the initiators - of suppression and repression, especially of
the mind and of the spirit. The black crows of nationalism perched upon
their beleaguered ivory towers.
They could have chosen differently. In 1989, the Balkans had a chance
the likes of which it never had before. In Yugoslavia, the government
of the reformist (though half hearted) Ante Markovic. Elsewhere,
Communism was gasping for a last breath and the slaughter of the beast
was at hand. The intellectuals of Central Europe, of the Baltic States
- even of Russia - chose to interpret these events to their people, to
encourage freedom and growth, to posit goals and to motivate. The
intellectuals of the Balkans failed miserably. Terrified by the sights
and sounds of their threatened territory - they succumbed to
obscurantism, resorted to the nostalgic, the abstract and the
fantastic, rather than to the pragmatic. This choice is evident even in
their speech. Marred by centuries of cruel outside domination - it is
all but meaningless. No one can understand what a Balkanian has to say.
Both syntax and grammar are tortured into incomprehensibility. Evasion
dominates, a profusion of obscuring verbal veils, twists and turns
hiding a vacuous deposition.
The Balkan intellectuals chose narcissistic self-absorption and navel
gazing over "other-orientation". Instead of seeking integration (as
distinct from assimilation) - they preach and practice isolation. They
aim to differentiate themselves not in a pluralistic, benign manner -
but in vicious, raging defiance of "mondialism" (a Serbian propaganda
term). To define themselves AGAINST all others - rather than to compare
and learn from the comparison. Their love affair with a (mostly
concocted) past, their future-phobia, and the ensuing culture shock -
all follow naturally from the premises of their disconsolate
uniqueness. Balkan intellectuals are all paranoids. Scratch the
surface, the thin, bow tied, veneer of "kultur" - and you will find an
atavistic poet, fighting against the very evil wrought by him and by
his actions. This is the Greek tragedy of this breathtaking region.
Nature here is cleverer than humans. It is exactly their conspiracies
that bring about the very things they have to conspire against in the
first place.
All over the world, intellectuals are the vanguard, the fifth column of
new ideas, the resistance movement against the occupation of the old
and the banal. Here intellectuals preach conformity, doing things the
old, proven way, protectionism against the trade of liberal minds. All
intellectuals here - fed by the long arm of the state - are
collaborators. True, all hideous regimes had their figleaf
intellectuals and with a few exceptions, the regimes in the Balkans are
not hideous. But the principle is the same, only the price varies.
Prostituting their unique position in semi-literate, village-tribal
societies - intellectuals in the Balkans sold out en masse. They are
the inertial power - rather than the counterfist of reform. They are
involved in politics of the wrong and doomed kind. The Balkan would
have been better off had they decided to remain aloof, detached in
their archipelago of universities.
There is no real fire in Balkan intellectuals. Oh, they get excited and
they shout and blush and wave their hands ever so vigorously. But they
are empty. It is full gas in neutral. They get nowhere because they are
going nowhere. They are rational and conservative and some are
emotional and "leftist". But it is all listless and lifeless, like the
paces of a very old mechanism, set in motion 80 years ago and never
unwound.
All that day of the eclipse of the last millennium, even the
intellectuals stayed in their cellars and in their offices and did not
dare venture out. They emerged when night fell, accustomed to the
darkness, unable to confront their own eclipse, hiding from the evil
influence of a re-emerging sun.
(Article written on August 14, 1999 and published August 30, 1999
in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 10)
Return
The Rip van Winkle Institutions
The West - naive, provincial and parochial - firmly believed that the
rot was confined to the upper echelons of communist and socialist
societies. Beneath the festering elites - the theory went - there are
wholesome masses waiting to be liberated from the shackles of
corruption, cronyism, double-talk and manipulation. Given half a decent
chance, these good people will revert to mature capitalism, replete
with functioning institutions. It was up to the West to provide these
long deprived people with this eagerly awaited chance.
What the West failed to realize was that communism was a collaborative
effort - a symbiotic co-existence of the rulers and the ruled, a mutual
undertaking and an all-pervasive pathology. It was not confined to
certain socio-economic strata, nor was it the imposed-from-above
product of a rapacious nomenclature. It was a wink and nod social
contract, a co-ordinated robbery, and an orgy of degeneration,
decadence and corruption attended by all the citizenry to varying
degrees. It was a decades long incestuous relationship between all the
social and economic players. To believe that all this can be erased
virtually overnight was worse than naive - it was idiotic.
Perhaps what fooled the West was the appearance of law and order. Most
communist countries inherited an infrastructure of laws and
institutions from their historical predecessors. Consider the Czech
Republic, East Germany, Poland, Yugoslavia and even Russia. These
countries had courts and police and media and banks long prior to the
calamitous onset of communism. What the latter did - ingeniously - was
to preserve the ossified skeletons of these institutions while draining
them from any real power. Decisions were made elsewhere, clandestinely,
the outcome of brutal internecine power struggles. But they were
legitimised by rubber stamp institutions: "parliaments", "judicial
system", "police", "banks", and the "media". The West knew that these
institutions were dysfunctional - but not to which breathtaking extent.
It assumed that nothing more than technical assistance was needed in
order to breathe life into the institutional infrastructure. It assumed
that market forces, egged on by a class of new and increasingly wealthy
shareholders, will force these institutions to shape up and begin to
cater to the needs of their constituencies. Above all, it assumed that
the will to have better and functioning institutions was there - and
that the only thing missing was the knowledge.
These were all catastrophically wrong assumptions. In all
post-communist countries, with no exception, one criminal association
(the communist or socialist party) was simply replaced by another
(often comprised of the very same people). Elections were used (more
often, abused) simply to queue the looters, organized in political
parties. The mass devastation of the state by everyone - the masses
included - proceeded apace, financed by generous credits and grants
from unsuspecting (or ostrich-like) multilaterals and donor conferences
(recall Bosnia). If anything, materialism - the venal form of
"capitalism" that erupted in the post communist planet - only
exacerbated the moral and ethical degeneracy of everyone involved.
Western governments, Western banks, Western businessmen and Western
institutions were sucked into the maelstrom of money laundering,
illicit trading, corruption, shoddiness and violence. To perpetuate
their clout and prowess, the new rulers did everything they could to
hinder the reform of their institutions and their restoration to
functionality.
In communist societies, banks were channels of political patronage
through which money was transferred from the state to certain
well-connected, enterprises. Bankers were low-level clerks, who handled
a limited repertoire of forms in a prescribed set of ways. Communist
societies had no commercial credits, consumer credits, payment
instruments, capital markets, retail banking, investment banking, or
merchant banking. The situation today, a decade after the demise of
communism is not much improved. In most countries in transition, the
domestic powers that be conspired to fend off foreign ownership of
their antiquated and comically (or, rather, tragically) politicised
"banks". The totally inept and incompetent management was not replaced,
nor were new management techniques introduced. The state kept bailing
out and re-capitalizing ailing banks. Political cronies and family
relatives kept obtaining subsidized loans unavailable to the
shrivelling private sector.
The courts, in the lands of socialism, were the vicious long arms of
the executive (actually, of the party). A mockery of justice, law and
common sense - judges were ill trained, politically nominated,
subservient and cowed into toeing the official line. Of dubious
intellectual pedigree and of certain unethical and immoral lineage -
judges were widely despised and derided, known to be universally
corrupt and ignorant even of the laws that they were ostensibly
appointed to administer. This situation hasn't changed in any post
communist society. The courts are slow and inefficient, corrupt and
lacking in specialization and education. The legal system is heavily
tilted in favour of the state and against the individual. Judges are
identified politically and their decisions are often skewed. The
executive, in many countries, does not hesitate to undermine the
legitimacy of the courts either by being seen to exploit their
political predilections, or by attacking them for being amenable to
such use by a rival party. This sorry state is only aggravated by the
frequent and erratic changes in legislation.
In communist times, the law enforcement agencies - primarily the
police, the customs and the secret service - were instruments of naked
aggression against dissidents, non-conformists and those who fell out
of favour. In the centre of immeasurable corruption, policemen were
often more dreaded than criminals. Customs officers enriched themselves
by resorting to extortion, bribe taking and acts of straightforward
expropriation. The secret services often ran a state within a state,
replete with militias, prisons, a court system, a parallel financial
system and trading companies. Again, the situation hasn't changed much.
Perhaps with the exception of the secret services, all these phenomena
still exist and in the open.
And then there is the media - the wastebasket of post communist
societies, the cesspool of influence peddling and calumny. Journalists
are easily bought and sold and their price is ever decreasing. They
work in mouthpieces of business interests masquerading as newspapers or
electronic media. They receive their instructions - to lie, to falsify,
to ignore, to emphasize, to suppress, to extort, to inform, to
collaborate with the authorities - from their Editor in Chief. They
trade news for advertising. Some of them are involved in all manner of
criminal activities, others are simply unethical in the extreme. They
all have pacts with Mammon. People do not believe a word these
contortionists of language and torturers of meaning write or say. It is
by comparing these tampered and biased sources that people reach their
own conclusions within their private medium.
One should hope that the disillusionment of the West is near. Post
communist societies are sick and their institutions are a travesty. As
is often the case with the mentally ill, there is a strong resistance
to treatment and recovery. The options are two: to disengage - or to
commit to an asylum with force-feeding, forced administering of
medication and constant monitoring. The worst behaviour is to go on
pretending that the problem does not exist, or that it is much less
serious than it really is. Denial and repression are the very sources
of dysfunction. They have to be fought. And sometimes the patient's own
welfare - not to mention that of his environment - requires
arm-twisting or the infliction of pain. There is a kernel of good
people in every society. In the post communist societies, this kernel
and suppressed and mocked and sometimes callously silenced. To give
these people a voice should be the first priority of the West. But this
cannot be done by colluding with their oppressors. The West has to
choose - and now.
(Article written on December 10, 1999 and published January 10, 2000
in "Central Europe Review" volume 2, issue 1)
Return
Inside, Outside
Diasporas and Modern States
A speech given at the meeting of the Canada-Macedonia Chamber of
Commerce in Toronto, Canada on December 4th, 1999
Distinguished Guests,
I was born to parents of the working class in Israel, in 1961. It was a
grim neighbourhood, in a polluted industrial area, a red bastion of the
"socialist" labour party. The latter would have easily qualified as
Bolshevik-communist anywhere else. It exerted the subtly pernicious
decadently corrupt kind of all-pervasive influence that is so typical
in one party states. Sure, there were a few token fringe opposition
parties but Labour's dominance went uninterrupted for more than 90
years. And corruption was both rife and rampant - nepotism, cronyism,
outright bribery. During the 70s, the recently appointed governor of
the central bank was imprisoned and a minister committed suicide. Many
more immolated themselves or ended serving long sentences in
over-crowded jails. Massive scandals erupted daily. Some of them cost
the country more than 10% of its GDP each (for example, the crisis of
the bank shares in 1983). In the 80s, privatisation turned into an orgy
of privateering, spawning a class of robber barons. Red tape is still a
major problem - and a major source of employment. And then there were
the wars and armed conflicts and vendettas and retributions and mines
and missiles and exploding buses and the gas masks. In its 52 years of
independence the country has gone through 6 major official wars and
more than 10 war-sized conflicts.
Yet, despite all the above, Israel emerged as by far the most
outstanding economic miracle. Its population was multiplied by 10 by
surges of immigrants. During the 50s, it tripled from 650,000 (1948 -
Jewish population figures only) to 2,000,000. The newcomers were all
destitute, the refugees of the geopolitics of hate from both the
Eastern block and from the Arab countries. The cultural, social and
religious profile of the latter stood in stark contrast to that of
their "hosts". Thus the seeds of long term inter-ethnic,
inter-cultural, social and religious conflicts were sown, soon to
blossom into full-fledged rifts. During the 90s - 800,000 Russian
immigrants flooded a Jewish population of 4,500,000 souls. But these
demographic upheavals did not disturb a pattern of unprecedented
economic growth, which led to a GDP per capita per annum of 17,000 USD.
Israel is a world leader in agriculture, armaments, information
technology, research and development in various scientific fields. Yet,
it is a desert country, smaller in area than Macedonia and with much
fewer and lesser natural endowments. It was subjected to an Arab
embargo for more than 40 consecutive years. On average it had c. 3
million inhabitants throughout its existence.
Israel's secret was the Jews in the Jewish Diaspora the world over.
From its very inception - as a budding concept in the febrile brain of
Herzl - the Jewish State was considered to be the home of all Jews,
wherever they are. A Law of Return granted them the right to
immediately become Israeli citizens upon stepping on the country's
soil. The Jewish State was considered to be an instrument of the Jewish
People, a shelter, an extension, a long arm, a collaborative and
symbiotic effort, an identity, an emotional apparatus, a buffer, an
insurance policy, a retirement home, a showcase, a convincing argument
against all anti-Semites past and present. There was no question
whatsoever regarding the implicit and explicit contractual obligations
between these two parties. The Jews in the Diaspora had to disregard
and ignore Israel's warts, misdeeds and disadvantages. They had to turn
a public blind eye to corruption, nepotism, cronyism, the inefficient
allocation of economic resources, blunders and failures. They had to
support Israel financially. In return, the Jewish State had to ensure
its own successful survival against all odds and to welcome all the
Jews to become its citizens whenever they chose to and no matter what
their previous record or history is. Hence the constant arguments about
WHO is a Jew and which institution should be allowed to monopolize the
endowment of this lucrative and, potentially, life saving status. Hence
the bitter resentment felt in many circles toward the 200,000 or so
non-Jewish immigrants, the relatives of the Jewish ones who flooded
Israel's shores in the last decade.
But the consensus was and is unharmed, appearances notwithstanding. And
the Jews supported Israel in numerous straightforward and inventive
ways. They volunteered to fight for it. They spied for it. They donated
money and built hospitals, schools, libraries, universities and
municipal offices. They supported students through scholarships and
young leaders through exchange programs. They managed and financed a
gigantic network of educational facilities from youth summer camps to
cultural exchanges. They bought the risky long-term bonds of the
nascent state, which was constantly fighting for its life (and they did
an excellent business in hindsight). Some of them invested money in
centrally planned, periphery bound, lost economic causes - ghost
factories that produced shoddy and undemanded goods. Year in and year
out they poured an average of half a billion US dollars a year annually
(about 200 million US dollars a year in net funds). Most of the money
did not come from the stereotypical Jewish billionaires. Most of it
came through a concerted effort of voluntary (though surely peer
pressured) money raising among hundreds of thousands of poor Jews the
world over. The Jewish people set up a horde of organizations whose aim
was collection of funds and their application to the advancement of
Zionist and Jewish causes. Every Jew deposited a few weekly cents into
the "Blue Box" - "for the cause": to redeem land, to establish
settlements, to open educational institutions, to publish a Jewish
newspaper, to act against anti-Semitism, to rebrand Judaism and fight
nefarious stereotypes. It was a grassroots movement directed only by
the dual slogans of "No Other Choice" and "The Whole World is Against
Us". Emanating from posttraumatic and paranoiac roots - it later became
a groundswell of goodwill, enthusiastic co-operation and pride.
And all this time, the Jews knew. Not only the sophisticated, worldly
Jewish moneymen. Not only the cosmopolitan, erudite Jewish
intellectuals. But also the more typical small time tailors and
shoemakers and restaurateurs and cab drivers and plumbers and sweatshop
textile workers. They all knew - and it did not sway them one bit. It
did not drive them away. They did not gripe and complain or abstain.
They kept coming. They kept pouring money into this seemingly
insatiable black hole. They kept believing. They kept waiting and they
kept active. And all these long decades - they knew.
They knew that Israel was ruled by a caste of utterly corrupt
politicians whose avarice equalled only their incompetence. They knew
that central planning was going nowhere fast. They knew that elections
were rigged, that red tape was strangling entrepreneurship and
initiative, that inter ethnic tension was explosive. They knew that
Israel lost its not to a demographically exploding Arab population
coupled with endless acts of terrorism. They knew that Israel's conduct
was not fair, not always democratic, and often unnecessarily
aggressive. They knew that tenders were won by bribes, that
transparency was a mockery, that the courts were negligent and
inefficient. They knew that property rights were not protected and that
people were pusillanimous and greedy and petty and self-occupied (not
to say narcissistic). They witnessed the waste of scarce resources, the
indefinitely protracted processes, the bureaucratic delays, the free
use of public funds for private ends. They watched as ministers and
members of the Knesset and top law enforcement agent conspired to
engage in crime and then colluded in covering it up. And they felt
betrayed and agonized over all this.
Yet, they NEVER - NEVER - not even for a second, considered giving up.
They NEVER - NEVER - stopped the money coming. They did not discontinue
the dialogue intended to make things better, over there, the land of
their so distant fathers. They always donated and invested and financed
and visited and cajoled and argued and opined and hoped and dreamed.
Because this was THEIR country, as well. Because it was a partnership
and the inexperienced, stray partner was given the benefit of
indefinite doubt. Because they saw the opportunity - the economic
opportunity, for sure - but, above all, the historical opportunity.
When Israel did mature, when it became a law state, orderly,
transparent, efficient, forward looking, the high tech Israel we all
know - it repaid them over and over again. They all made money on their
decades of patience and endurance. The rich made big money. The small
guys made less. But there is no Jew today who can say that he lost
money in Israel because he became financially or economically active
there in the long run.
They stuck to Israel primarily because they were Jews (and, by easy
extension, Israelis). And this is what being a Jew meant. And they were
richly rewarded by the Justice Minister of history. Perhaps there is a
lesson to be learnt here by Macedonians in the Diaspora. I, for one, am
sure there is.
Thank you.
Return
The Magla Vocables
The Macedonians have a word for it - "Magla", fog. It signifies the
twin arts of duplicity and ambiguity. In the mental asylum that the
swathe of socialist countries was, even language was pathologised. It
mutated into a weapon of self-defence, a verbal fortification, a medium
without a message, replacing words with vocables. Easterners (in this
text, the unfortunate residents of the Kafkaesque landscape which
stretches between Russia and Albania) don't talk or communicate. They
fend off. They hide and evade and avoid and disguise. In the planet of
capricious and arbitrary unpredictability, of shifting semiotic and
semantic dunes that they inhabited for so many decades (or centuries) -
they perfected the ability to say nothing in lengthy, Castro-like
speeches. The ensuing convoluted sentences are Arabesques of
meaninglessness, acrobatics of evasion, lack of commitment elevated to
an ideology. The Easterner prefers to wait and see and see what waiting
brings. It is the postponement of the inevitable that leads to the
inevitability of postponement as a strategy of survival.
It is impossible to really understand an Easterner. The syntax fast
deteriorates into ever more labyrinthine structures. The grammar
tortured to produce the verbal Doppler shifts essential to disguise the
source of the information, its distance from reality, the speed of its
degeneration into rigid official versions. Buried under the lush flora
and fauna of idioms without an end, the language erupts, like some
exotic rash, an autoimmune reaction to its infection and contamination.
And this newspeak, this malignant form of political correctness is not
the exclusive domain of politicians or "intellectuals". Like vile weeds
it spread throughout, strangling with absent minded persistence the
ability to understand, to agree, to disagree and to debate, to present
arguments, to compare notes, to learn and to teach. Easterners,
therefore, never talk to each other - rather, they talk at each other.
They exchange subtexts, camouflage-wrapped by elaborate, florid, texts.
They read between the lines, spawning a multitude of private languages,
prejudices, superstitions, conspiracy theories, rumours, phobias and
mass hysterias. Theirs is a solipsistic world - where communication is
permitted only with oneself and the aim of language is to throw others
off the scent.
This has profound implications. Communication through unequivocal,
unambiguous, information-rich symbol systems is such an integral and
crucial part of our world - that its absence is not postulated even in
the remotest galaxies, which grace the skies of science fiction. In
this sense, Easterners are nothing short of aliens. It is not that they
employ a different language, a code to be deciphered by a new
Champollion. The Cyrillic alphabet is not the obstacle. It is also not
the outcome of cultural differences. It is the fact that language is
put by Easterners to a different use - not to communicate but to
obscure, not to share but to abstain, not to learn but to defend and
resist, not to teach but to preserve ever less tenable monopolies, to
disagree without incurring wrath, to criticize without commitment, to
agree without appearing to do so. Thus, Eastern contracts are vague
expressions of intentions at a given moment - rather than the clear
listing of long term, iron-cast and mutual commitments. Eastern laws
are loopholed incomprehensibles, open to an exegesis so wide and so
self-contradictory that it renders them meaningless. Eastern
politicians and Eastern intellectuals often hang themselves by their
own verbose Gordic knots, having stumbled through a minefield of
logical fallacies and endured self inflicted inconsistencies.
Unfinished sentences hover in the air, like vapour above a semantic
swamp.
In some countries (the poorer ones, which were suppressed for centuries
by foreign occupiers), there is the strong urge not to offend. Still at
the tribal-village stage of social development, intimacy and
inter-dependence are great. Peer pressure is irresistible and it
results in conformity and mental homogeneity. Aggressive tendencies,
strongly repressed in this social pressure cooker, are close under the
veneer of forced civility and violent politeness. Constructive
ambiguity, a non-committal "everyone is good and right", an atavistic
variant of moral relativism and tolerance bred of fear and of contempt
- are all at the service of this eternal vigilance against aggressive
drives, at the disposal of a never ending peacekeeping mission.
In other countries, language is used cruelly and ruthlessly to ensnare
one's enemies, to saw confusion and panic, to move the masses, to leave
the listeners in doubt, in hesitation, in paralysis, to gain control,
or to punish. There, symbols are death sentences in both the literal
and the figurative senses. Poets, authors and journalists still vanish
regularly and newspapers and books are compiled into black lists with
dreadful consequences. In these countries, language is enslaved and
forced to lie. There is no news - only views, no interest - only
interests, no facts - only propaganda, no communication - only
ex-communication. The language is appropriated and expropriated. It is
considered to be a weapon, an asset, a piece of lethal property, a
traitorous mistress to be gang raped into submission.
And yet in other places in the East, the language is a lover. The
infatuation with its very sound leads to a pyrotechnic type of speech
which sacrifices its meaning to its music. Its speakers pay more
attention to the composition than to the content. They are swept by it,
intoxicated by its perfection, inebriated by the spiralling complexity
of its forms. Here, language is an inflammatory process. It attacks the
social tissues with artistic fierceness. It invades the healthy cells
of reason and logic, of cool-headed argumentation and level headed
debate. It raises the temperature of the body politic. It often kills.
It moves masses. Submerged in and lured by the notes issued forth by
the pied piper of the moment - nations go to war, or to civil war,
resonating with the echoes of their language.
Language is a leading indicator of the psychological and institutional
health of social units. Social capital can often be measured in
cognitive (hence, verbal-lingual) terms. To monitor the level of
comprehensibility and lucidity of texts is to study the degree of
sanity of nations (think about the rambling "Mein Kampf"). There can
exist no hale society without unambiguous speech, without clear
communications, without the traffic of idioms and content that is an
inseparable part of every social contract. Our language determines how
we perceive our world. It IS our mind and our consciousness. The
much-touted transition starts in the mind and consciousness determines
reality. Marx would have approved.
(Article written on December 8, 1999 and published December 13, 1999
in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 25)
Return
The Elders of Zion
I was shown the same book in Yugoslavia, in Macedonia and in Bulgaria -
"The World Conspiracy" - a shabby tome written by an ageing "scholar".
The main, unabashedly anti-Semitic, hypothesis (presented as undisputed
fact) is that the Jews rule the world supreme - always have, probably
always will. Lists of prominent Jews in the world of international
finance reprinted with lists of influential Jews in the Soviet
communist regime. And it all amounts to a well-organized secretive
machinery of illicit power, claims the author with all the persuasion
of a paranoid. In here, trash magazines dwell endlessly on these and
similar themes.
Yet, anti-Semitism is only one species in a zoo of rumours, conspiracy
theories, Meta histories and metaphysics. Superstitions, prejudices and
calumny thrive in the putrid soil of disinformation, mis-information
and lack of information. In the void created by unreliable, politicised
and corrupt media - rumour mills spring eternal. It is a malignant
growth, the outcome of a breakdown of trust so compleat - that
communication is rendered impossible. This is the main characteristic
of the East (from Russia to Albania): distrust. Citizens and
politicians, businessmen and government, the media and its consumers,
manufacturers and service providers, the sick and their doctors - all
suspect each other of ulterior motives and foul play. All are more
often than not quite right to do so.
It is a Kafkaesque, sealed universe in which nothing is, as it appears
to be. This acrimonious divorce between appearances and essence, facade
and truth, the Potemkin and the real - is a facet of daily life, of the
most mundane exchanges, of the most trivial pursuits. Motives are
sought with increasing urgency - why did he do it, what did he try to
achieve, why had he not chosen a different path, why here, why with us,
why now, what can it teach us. Information is pursued frantically,
appearances discarded, data juggled, heated debates ensue, versions
erupt, only to subside and be replaced by others. It is a feverish
ritual, the sound of clashing exegeses, of theories constructed and
demolished in vacuo.
At the heart of it all, is the unbearable uncertainty of being.
Political uncertainty under communism was replaced by economic
uncertainty under the insidious and venal form of capitalism that
replaced it. Tucked in identical cubicles, the citizens of planet
communism were at least assured of a make belief job in a sprawling
bureaucracy or in a decrepit factory, manufacturing redundant documents
or shoddy goods. Subsistence was implicitly guaranteed by the
kleptocracy that ruled them and, in principle, it was always possible
to ignore the moral stench and join the nomenklatura, thereby
developing instant upward mobility. Corruption, theft and graft were
tolerated by the state as means of complementing income. Life was drab
but safe as long as one abstained from politics and subserviently
consumed the bitter medicines of acquiescence and collaboration. The
vast majority (with the exception of the USSR under Stalin) were not
affected by the arbitrary capriciousness of history. They decayed
slowly in their housing estates, morally degenerate, possession-less
but certain of a future that is the spitting image of their past.
Under the spastic orgy of legalized robbery of state assets that passed
for privatisation, millions were made redundant while thousands
enriched themselves by choreographed looting. The results were
instability, unpredictability, uncertainty and fear. In a world thus
unhinged, the masses groped for reason, for a scheme, for a method in
the madness, for an explanation, however sinister and ominous. Anything
was preferable to the seemingly random natural forces unleashed upon
them with such apparent vengeance. Even a "World Government" (a
favourite), the Illuminati (a Freemasonry-like movement but much more
odious), the Jews, the USA, aliens. The greatest conspiracy theory of
them all - the Phoenix of religion - sprang back to life from the ashes
it was reduced to by communism. A host of mystical beliefs and sects
and cults mushroomed noxiously in the humid shadows of irrationality.
Thus, every event, no matter how insignificant, any occurrence, no
matter how inconsequential and any coincidence, no matter how
coincidental - assume heraldic meaning. People in these domains carry
their complex jigsaw puzzles with them. They welcome each new piece
with the zeal of the converted. They bellow triumphantly with every
"proof" of their pet theory, with every datum, with each rumour. Things
don't just happen - they whisper, conspiratorially - things are
directed from above, ordained, regulated, prevented, or encouraged by
"them". A group of 400 rule the world. They are Jews, they are the Serb
mafia, or the Bulgarian. Or the Americans who plan to dominate (which
obviously puts Kosovo in context). They are the rich and powerful, the
objects of envy and frightened admiration, of virulent hate and rage.
They are responsible. We pay the price - we, the small and powerless
and poor. And it is hopeless, it has been like that forever. The
disparity between them and us is too great. Resistance is futile.
Why was this president elected? Surely, the West demanded it. Or
political parties conspired to rig the vote. Or rich businessmen
supported him. What is the real aim of foreign investors in coming to
these godforsaken places, if not to infiltrate and penetrate and
establish their long-term dominion? And wouldn't it be safe to assume
that al the foreigners are spies, that all the Jews collaborate, that
the neighbours would have liked to conquer and to subjugate us, that
the world is a colossal puppet show? In other words, is it not true
that we are puppets - victims - in a theatre not of our making? They
filter out that which does not conform to their persuasion, does not
accord with their suspicions, and does not fit within their schemes.
This deferral of responsibility brings relief from shame and blame.
Guilt is allayed by symbolically and ritually passing it onto another.
Fear is quelled by the introduction of schemata. These are potent
psychological incentives. They provide structure to the amorphous,
bring order to the chaos that is the brave, new world of the economies
in transition. Flux is replaced by immutable "truths", possibilities by
certainties, threats by "knowledge". It is a re-construction and
reconquest of a paradise lost by giving up the fruit of the tree of
knowledge.
It is this hyper-vigilance, this elevated suspicion, these instant
certainties fabricated from frail pseudo-theories and conspiracies -
that make the Man of the East so easy to manipulate, so vulnerable, so
amenable to collude in his own downfall. Bewitched by his self-spun
myths, captivated by his own paranoia, under the spell of his magical,
immature, thinking - non critical, non analytical, non discriminating -
he is exquisitely susceptible to crooks and charlatans, to manipulators
and demagogues, to the realization of the very threats he tried to fend
off in the first place.
Here is what the DSM ("Diagnostics and Statistics Manual") IV (1994)
published by the APA (American Psychiatric Association) has to say
about paranoids and schizotypals:
The Paranoid Personality Disorder
A pervasive distrust and suspiciousness of others such that their
motives are interpreted as malevolent, beginning by early adulthood and
present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by four (or more) of the
following:
1. Suspects without sufficient basis, that others are exploiting,
harming, or deceiving him or her;
2. Is preoccupied with unjustified doubts about the loyalty or
trustworthiness of friends or associates;
3. Is reluctant to confide in others because of unwarranted fear
that the information will be used maliciously against him or her;
4. Reads hidden demeaning or threatening meanings into benign
remarks or events;
5. Persistently bears grudges, i.e., is unforgiving of insults,
injuries, or slights;
6. Perceives attacks on his or her character or reputation that
are not apparent to others and is quick to react angrily or to
counterattack;
7. Has recurrent suspicions, without justification, regarding
fidelity of spouse or sexual partner.
Schizotypal Personality Disorder
A pervasive pattern of social and interpersonal deficits marked by
acute discomfort with and reduced capacity for close relationships as
well as by cognitive or perceptual distortions and eccentricities of
behaviour beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of
contexts as indicated by five (or more) of the following:
1. Ideas of reference (excluding delusions of reference) - (SV:
the delusional belief that others are looking at him pointing at him,
talking about him, especially in a derogatory manner);
2. Odd beliefs or magical thinking that influences behaviour and
is inconsistent with subcultural norms (e.g., superstitiousness, belief
in clairvoyance, telepathy, or "sixth sense"; in children and
adolescents, bizarre fantasies or preoccupations);
3. Unusual perceptual experiences, including bodily illusions;
4. Odd thinking and speech (e.g., vague, circumstantial,
metaphorical, over-elaborate, or stereotyped);
5. Suspiciousness or paranoid ideation;
6. Inappropriate and constricted affect;
7. Behaviour, or appearance that is odd, eccentric, or peculiar;
8. Lack of close friends or confidants other than first-degree
relatives;
9. Excessive social anxiety that does not diminish with
familiarity and tends to be associated with paranoid fears rather than
negative judgements about self.
(Article written on December 9, 1999 and published December 13, 1999
in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 25)
Return
The Last Family
"One man cannot be a warrior on a battlefield"
(Russian proverb)
There is no word for it in Russian. Platon Karatayev, the typical
"Russian soul" in Tolstoy's "War and Peace", extols, for pages at a
time, the virtues of communality and disparages the individual - this
otherwise useless part of the greater whole. In Macedonia the words
"private" or "privacy" pertain to matters economic. The word "intimacy"
is used instead to designate the state of being free of prying,
intrusive eyes and acts of meddling. Throughout Central and Eastern
Europe, the rise of "individualism" did not give birth to its
corollary: "privacy". After decades (and, in most cases, centuries) of
cramped, multi-generational shared accommodation, it is no wonder.
To the alienated and schizoid ears of Westerners, the survival of
family and community in CEE sounds like an attractive proposition. A
dual-purpose safety net, both emotional and economic, the family in
countries in transition provides its members with unemployment
benefits, accommodation, food and psychological advice to boot.
Divorced daughters, saddled with little (and not so little) ones, the
prodigal sons incapable of finding a job befitting their
qualifications, the sick, the unhappy - all are absorbed by the
compassionate bosom of the family and, by extension the community. The
family, the neighbourhood, the community, the village, the tribe - are
units of subversion as well as useful safety valves, releasing and
regulating the pressures of contemporary life in the modern,
materialistic, crime ridden state. The ancient blood feud laws of the
kanoon were handed over through familial lineages in northern Albania,
in defiance of the paranoiac Enver Hoxha regime. Criminals hide among
their kin in the Balkans, thus effectively evading the long arm of the
law (state). Jobs are granted, contracts signed and tenders won on an
open and strict nepotistic basis and no one finds it odd or wrong.
There is something atavistically heart-warming in all this.
Historically, the rural units of socialization and social organization
were the family and the village. As villagers migrated to the cities,
these structural and functional patterns were imported by them, en
masse. The shortage of urban apartments and the communist invention of
the communal apartment (its tiny rooms allocated one per family with
kitchen and bathroom common to all) only served to perpetuate these
ancient modes of multi-generational huddling. At best, the few
available apartments were shared by three generations: parents, married
offspring and their children. In many cases, the living space was also
shared by sickly or no-good relatives and even by unrelated families.
These living arrangements - more adapted to rustic open spaces than to
high rises - led to severe social and psychological dysfunctions. To
this very day, Balkan males are spoiled by the subservience and
servitude of their in-house parents and incessantly and compulsively
catered to by their submissive wives. Occupying someone else's home,
they are not well acquainted with adult responsibilities. Stunted
growth and stagnant immaturity are the hallmarks of an entire
generation, stifled by the ominous proximity of suffocating, invasive
love. Unable to lead a healthy sex life behind paper thin walls, unable
to raise their children and as many children as they see fit, unable to
develop emotionally under the anxiously watchful eye of their parents -
this greenhouse generation is doomed to a zombie-like existence in the
twilight nether land of their parents' caves. Many ever more eagerly
await the demise of their caring captors and the promised land of their
inherited apartments, free of their parents' presence.
The daily pressures and exigencies of co-existence are enormous. The
prying, the gossip, the criticism, the chastising, the small agitating
mannerisms, the smells, the incompatible personal habits and
preferences, the pusillanimous bookkeeping - all serve to erode the
individual and to reduce him or her to the most primitive mode of
survival. This is further exacerbated by the need to share expenses, to
allocate labour and tasks, to plan ahead for contingencies, to see off
threats, to hide information, to pretend and to fend off emotionally
injurious behaviour. It is a sweltering tropic of affective cancer.
Newly found materialism brought these territories a malignant form of
capitalism coupled with a sub-culture of drugs and crime. The
eventuating disintegration of all polities in the ensuing moral vacuum
was complete. From the more complex federations or states and their
governments, through intermediate municipalities and down to the most
primitive of political cells - the family - they all crumbled in a
storm of discontent and blood. The mutant frontier-"independence" or
pioneer-"individualism" imported from Western B movies led to a
functional upheaval unmatched by a structural one. People want privacy
and intimacy more than ever - but they still inhabit the same shoddily
constructed, congested accommodation and they still earn poorly or are
unemployed. This tension between aspiration and perspiration is
potentially revolutionary. It is this unaccomplished, uneasy
metamorphosis that tore the social fabric of CEE apart, rendering it
poisoned and dysfunctional. This is nothing new - it is what brought
socialism and its more vicious variants down.
But what is new is inequality. Ever the pathologically envious, the
citizens of CEE bathed in common misery. The equal distribution of
poverty and hardship guaranteed their peace of mind. A Jewish proverb
says: "The trouble of the many is half a consolation." It is this
breakdown of symmetry of wretchedness that really shook the social
order. The privacy and intimacy and freedom gained by the few are bound
to incite the many into acts of desperation. After all, what can be
more individualistic, more private, more mind requiting, more
tranquillizing than being part of a riotous mob intent of implementing
a platform of hate and devastation?
(Article written on January 9, 2000 and published January 24, 2000
in "Central Europe Review" volume 2, issue 3)
Return
Rasputin in Transition
The mad glint in his eyes is likely to be nothing more ominous than
maladjusted contact lenses. If not clean-shaven, he is likely to sport
nothing wilder than a goatee. More likely an atheist than a priest,
this mutation of the ageless confidence artist is nonetheless the
direct spiritual descendent of Rasputin, the raving maniac who governed
Russia until his own execution by Russian noblemen and patriots.
They are to be found in all countries in transition. Wild and insidious
weeds, the outcome of wayward pollination by mutated capitalism. They
prey on their victims, at first acquiring their confidence and love,
then penetrating their political, social and financial structures
almost as a virus would: stealthily and treacherously. By the time
their quarry wakes up to its infection and subjugation - it is already
too late. By then, the invader will have become part of the invaded or
its master, either through blackmail or via tempting subornation.
This region of the CEE and the Balkans provides for fertile grounds. It
is a Petrie dish upon which cultures of corruption and scandalous
conduct are fermented. The typical exploiter of these vulnerabilities
is a foreigner. Things foreign are held in awe and adulation by a
populace so down trodden and made to feel inferior in every way, not
least by foreign tutors and advisors. The craving to be loved, this
gnawing urge to be accepted, to be a member of the club, to be
distinguished from one's former neighbours - are irresistible. The
modern Rasputin doles out this unconditional acceptance, this
all-encompassing affinity, the echoes of avuncularity. In doing so, he
evokes in the recipients such warmth, such relief, such fervour and
reciprocity - that he becomes an idol, a symbol of a paradise long
lost, a golden braid. Having thus completed the first phase of his
meticulous attack - he moves on to the second chapter in this book of
body snatching.
Armed with his new-fangled popularity, the crook moves on and leverages
it to the hilt. He does so by feigning charity, by faking interest, by
false "constructive criticism". To his slow forming army, he recruits
the media, the flower children, the bleeding hearts, reformers,
dissidents and the occasional freak. By holding old authority in
disdain, by declaring his contempt for the methods of the "tried and
true", by appearing to make war upon all rot and immorality - this
creature of expediency emerges as a folk hero. It is the more cynical
and world weary and "sophisticated" members of society that lead the
way, succumbing to his ardour and conviction, to his child-like
innocence, to his unwavering agenda. He cleverly thrusts at them the
double edge of their own disillusionment and disappointment. Thus
mirrored, they are transformed and converted into his camp of renewal
and clean promises by this epiphany. They hand him the keys to every
medium, the very codes and secrets that make him so powerful. They
pledge their alliance and allegiance and render to him the access they
possess to the nerve centres of society. The castle gates thus opened
from inside, his victory assured, the rogue moves on to consummate this
unholy marriage between himself and the deceived.
Always in fear of light, he surreptitiously and cunningly begins to
interact with the foci of power and money in the land. However
loathsome he is to them, however repulsive the experience, however
undesirable the effects of their surrender - they are made to recognize
him as their equal. With the might of the media and a large part of the
people behind him, he can no longer be ignored. Their conspiracy-prone
mind, awash with superstitions and its attaching phobias, tries to
comprehend his meteoric rise, the forcefulness with which he treads,
his unmitigated, inane, self-confidence. Is he a spy? A member of a
secret order? The latent agent of a hyperpower? The heart of a world
conspiracy? Has he no fear of retribution and no remorse? Before this
great unknown, they kneel and yield, an atavistic reaction to atavistic
fears. Now all doors are thrown open, all deals are made available, all
secrets are revealed. The more he learns, the mightier he becomes - the
more his might, the more he learns. To him, a virtuous cycle, to his
hosts - a vicious one.
In all this tumult, he does not lose sight of his original goals -
power, money, fame, all three. It is a relentless pursuit, an obsessive
hunt, a ruthless and unscrupulous chase. In his war, no prisoners are
taken, no price too dear, no human in his orbit left untouched. He will
manipulate and threat and beg and promise and plead and blackmail and
extort to accomplish that which he set out to achieve: decision making
powers, wealth, clout, exposure and resultant fame. It is at this stage
that the latter day Rasputin emerges from the shadows and joins
officialdom or concludes lucrative transactions based on favourably
deflated prices and insider dealing. By now, his shady past is no
longer a hindrance. His prowess far exceeds his invidious biography.
Well installed, he ignores both media and the people. He brushes aside
contemptuously all criticism and enquiry. His true, narcissistic, face
is exposed and it is hideous to behold. But there is nothing to be done
and all resistance is futile. The con man now is in a haste to maximize
his hard earned profits and exit the scene, on his way to another realm
of guile and naiveté.
(Article written on January 25, 2000 and published February 14, 2000
in "Central Europe Review" volume 2, issue 6)
Return
The Honorary Academic
Mira Markovic is an "Honorary Academic" of the Russian Academy of
Science. It cost a lot of money to obtain this title and the Serb
multi-billionaire Karic was only too glad to cough it up. Whatever else
you say about Balkan cronies, they rarely bite the hand that feeds them
(unless and until it is expedient to do so). And whatever else you say
about Russia, it adapted remarkably to capitalism. Everything has a
price and a market. Israel had to learn this fact the hard way when
Russian practical-nurse-level medical doctors and
construction-worker-level civil engineers flooded its shores.
Everything is for sale in this region of opportunities, instant
education inclusive.
It seems that academe suffered the most during the numerous shock
therapies and transition periods showered upon the impoverished
inhabitants of Eastern and Central Europe. The resident of decrepit
communist-era buildings, it had to cope with a flood of eager students
and a deluge of anachronistic "scholars". But in Russia, the CIS and
the Balkans the scenery is nothing short of Dantesque. Unschooled in
any major European language, lazily content with their tenured
positions, stagnant and formal - the academics and academicians of the
Balkans are both failures and a resounding indictment of the rigor
mortis that was socialism. Economics textbooks stop short of mentioning
Friedman or Phelps. History textbooks should better be relegated to the
science fiction shelves. A brave facade of self-sufficiency covers up a
vast hinterland of inferiority complex fully supported by real
inferiority. In antiquated libraries, shattered labs, crooked buildings
and inadequate facilities, students pursue redundant careers with the
wrong teachers.
Corruption seethes under this repellent surface. Teachers sell exams,
take bribes, and trade incestuous sex with their students. They refuse
to contribute to their communities. In all my years in the Balkans, I
have yet to come across a voluntary act - a single voluntary act - by
an academic. And I have come across numerous refusals to help and to
contribute. Materialism incarnate.
This sorry state of affairs has a twofold outcome. On the one hand,
herds of victims of rigidly dictated lectures and the suppression of
free thought. These academic products suffer from the twin afflictions
of irrelevance of skills and the inability to acquire relevant ones,
the latter being the result of decades of brainwashing and industrial
educational methods. Unable to match their anyhow outdated knowledge
with anything a modern marketplace can offer - they default on to
menial jobs, rebel or pull levers to advance in life. Which leads us to
the death of meritocracy and why this region's future is behind it.
In the wake of the downfall of all the major ideologies of the 20th
century - Fascism, Communism, etc. the New Order, heralded by President
Bush, emerged as a battle of Open Club versus Closed Club societies, at
least from the economic point of view.
All modern states and societies must choose whether to be governed by
merit (meritocracy) or by the privileged few (oligarchy). It is
inevitable that the social and economic structures be controlled by
elites. It is a complex world and only a few can master the knowledge
it takes to govern effectively. What sets meritocracy apart is not the
number of members of its ruling (or leading) class, usually no larger
than an oligarchy. No, it is distinguished by its membership criteria
and by the mode of their application.
The meritocratic elite is an open club because it satisfies three
conditions:
1. The process and rules of joining up (i.e., the criteria) are
transparent and widely known;
2. The application and membership procedures are uniform, equal to
all and open to continuous public scrutiny and criticism;
3. The system alters its membership requirements in direct
response to public feedback and to the changing social and economic
environment.
To belong to a meritocracy one needs to satisfy a series of demands,
whose attainment is entirely up to he individual. And that is all that
one needs to do. The rules of joining and of membership are cast in
iron. The wishes and opinions of those who happen to comprise the club
at any given moment are of no importance and of no consequence.
Meritocracy is a "fair play" by rules of equal chance to derive
benefits. Put differently, is the rule of law.
To join a meritocratic club, one needs to demonstrate that one is in
possession of, or has access to, "inherent" parameters, such as
intelligence, a certain level of education, a potential to contribute
to society. An inherent parameter must correspond to a criterion and
the latter must be applied independent of the views and predilections
of those who sometimes are forced to apply it. The members of a
committee or a board can disdain an applicant, or they might wish not
to approve a candidate. Or they may prefer someone else for the job
because they owe her something, or because they play golf with him.
Yet, they are permitted to consider only the applicant's or the
candidate's "inherent" parameters: does he have the necessary tenure,
qualifications, education, experience? Does he contribute to his
workplace, community, and society at large? In other words: is he
"worthy" or "deserving"? Not WHO he is - but WHAT he is.
Granted, these processes of selection, admission, incorporation and
assimilation are administered by mere humans and are, therefore,
subject to human failings. Can qualifications be always judged
"objectively, unambiguously and unequivocally"? Can "the right
personality traits" or "the ability to engage in teamwork" be evaluated
"objectively"? These are vague and ambiguous enough to accommodate bias
and bad will. Still, at least appearances are kept in most cases - and
decisions can be challenged in courts.
What characterizes oligarchy is the extensive, relentless and ruthless
use of "transcendent" (in lieu of "inherent") parameters to decide who
will belong where, who will get which job and, ultimately, who will
enjoy which benefits. The trouble with transcendent parameters is that
there is nothing much an applicant or a candidate can do about them.
Usually, they are accidents, occurrences absolutely beyond the reach or
control of those most affected by them. Race is such a transcendent
parameter and so are gender, familial affiliation or contacts and
influence.
In many corners of the globe, to join a closed, oligarchic club, to get
the right job, to enjoy excessive benefits - one must be white
(racism), male (sexual discrimination), born to the right family
(nepotism), or to have the right political (or other) contacts
(cronyism). And often, belonging to one such club is the prerequisite
for joining another.
In France, for instance, the whole country is politically and
economically run by graduates of the Ecole Normale d'Administration
(ENA). They are known as the ENArques (=the royal dynasty of ENA
graduates).
The privatisation of state enterprises in most East and Central
European countries provided a glaring example of oligarchic
machinations. In most of these countries (the Czech Republic,
Macedonia, Serbia and Russia are notorious examples) - state companies,
the nation's only assets, were "sold" to political cronies, creating in
the process a pernicious amalgam of capitalism and oligarchy, known as
"crony capitalism" or privateering. The national wealth was passed on
to the hands of relatively few, well connected, individuals, at a
ridiculously low price. The nations involved were robbed, their riches
either squandered or smuggled abroad.
In the affairs of humans, not everything falls neatly into place. Take
money, for instance. Is it an inherent parameter or an expressly
transcendent one? Making money indicates the existence of some merit,
some inherent advantageous traits of the moneymaking individual. To
make money consistently, a person needs to be diligent, resilient, hard
working, to prevail and overcome hardships, to be far sighted and to
possess a host of other - universally acclaimed - traits. On the other
hand, is it fair when someone who made his fortune through corruption,
inheritance, or luck - be preferred to a poor genius?
That is a contentious issue. In the USA money talks. Being possessed of
money means being virtuous and meritorious. To preserve a fortune
inherited is as difficult a task as to make it in the first place, the
thinking goes. Thus, the source of the money is secondary.
An oligarchy tends to have long term devastating economic effects.
The reason is that the best and the brightest - when shut out by the
members of the ruling elites - emigrate. In a country where one's job
is determined by his family connections or by influence peddling -
those best fit to do the job are likely to be disappointed, then
disgusted and then to leave the place altogether.
This is the phenomenon known as "Brain Drain". It is one of the biggest
migratory tidal waves in human history. Capable, well-trained,
educated, young people leave their oligarchic, arbitrary, influence
peddling societies and migrate to less arbitrary meritocracies (mostly
to be found in what is collectively known as "The West").
This is colonialism of the worst kind. The mercantilist definition of a
colony is a territory, which exports raw materials only to re-import
them in the form of finished products. The Brain drain is exactly that:
the poorer countries are exporting raw brains and buying back the
finished products masterminded, invented and manufactured by theses
brains.
Yet, while in classical colonialism, the colony at least received some
recompense for its goods - here the poor country is actually the poorer
for its exports. The bright young people who depart (most of them never
to return) carry with them an investment of the scarce resources of
their homeland - and award it to their new, much richer, host
countries. This is an absurd situation, a subsidy granted reluctantly
by the poor to the rich. This is also one of the largest capital
transfers (really capital flight) in history.
Some poor countries understood these basic, unpleasant, facts of life.
They extracted an "education fee" from those emigrating. This fee was
supposed to, at least partially, recapture the costs of educating and
training the immigrants. Romania and the USSR imposed such levies on
Jews immigrating to Israel in the 1970s. Others despairingly regard the
brain drain as a natural catastrophe. Very few countries are trying to
tackle the fundamental, structural and philosophical flaws of the
system, the roots of the disenchantment of those who leave.
The Brain Drain is so serious that some countries lost up to a third of
their total young and educated population to it (Macedonia in
South-eastern Europe, some less developed countries in South East Asia
and in Africa). Others were drained of almost one half of the growth in
their educated workforce (for instance, Israel during the 1980s).
Brains are an ideal natural resource: they can be cultivated, directed,
controlled, manipulated, regulated. They are renewable and replicable.
Brains tend to grow exponentially through interaction and they have an
unparalleled economic value added. The profit margin in knowledge and
information related industries far exceeds anything common to more
traditional, second wave, industries (not to mention first wave
agriculture and agribusiness).
What is even more important:
Poor countries are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this third
revolution. With cheap, educated workforce - they can monopolize basic
data processing and telecommunications functions worldwide. True, this
calls for massive initial investments in physical infrastructure. But
the important input is the wetware, the brains. To constrain them, to
disappoint them, to make them run away, to more merit-orientated places
- is to sentence oneself to a permanent disadvantage and deprivation.
This is what the countries in the Balkans are doing. Driving away the
best part of their population by encouraging the worst part. Abandoning
their future by dwelling on their past. Caught in a fatal spider web of
family connections and political cronyism of their own design. Their
factories and universities and offices and government filled to the
brim with third-rate relatives of third-rate professors and
bureaucrats. Turning themselves into third-rate countries in a
self-perpetuating, self-feeding process of decline. And all the while
eyeing the new and the foreign with the paranoia that is the result of
true guilt.
(Article written on September 8, 1999 and published September 27, 1999
in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 14)
Return
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 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 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
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-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 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 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 amassed, 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)
Return
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 assist their future masters and colonizers to disembark.
In between these extremes - of annihilation and assimilation - 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 identities 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
Nazi Reich and the Stalinist USSR fell to ethnic pieces.
The national(istic) school supports the formation of ethnically
homogenous states, if necessary, by humane and gradual (or inhuman and
abrupt) ethnic cleansing. Homogeneity 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 Nazis 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 mass media and school indoctrination. Every
facet of life was subjected to and incorporated in this relentless and
unforgiving pursuit of national identity: 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 identities of Brittany and Provence were
submerged within the French collective one and so was the identity 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 sadists. 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 municipalities where they constitute more than a given
percentage (usually twenty) of the total population. Official
documents, 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 municipalities precisely on this issue.
2. The Territorial Autonomy
Ethnic minorities often constitute 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 constitution
(which Milosevic shredded to very small pieces). This solution was
sometimes adopted by the nationalist competition itself. The Nazis
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 entitled 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.
How and why did we find ourselves embroiled in such a mess?
It is all the result of the wrong terminology, an example of the power
of words. The Jews (and Germans) came up with the "objective",
"genetic", "racial" and "organic" nation. Membership was determined by
external factors over which the member-individual had no control. The
French "civil" model - an 18th century innovation - regarded the nation
and the state as voluntary collectives, bound by codes and values,
which are subject to social contracts. Benedict Anderson called the
latter "imagined communities".
Naturally, it was a Frenchman (Ernest Renan) who wrote:
"Nations are not eternal. They had a beginning and they will have an
end. And they will probably be replaced by a European confederation."
He was referring to the fact that nation STATES were nothing but (at
the time) a century old invention of dubious philosophical pedigree.
The modern state was indeed invented by intellectuals (historians and
philologists) and then solidified by ethnic cleansing and the horrors
of warfare. Jacob Grimm virtually created the chimeral Serbo-Croat
"language". Claude Fauriel dreamt up the reincarnation of ancient
Greece in its eponymous successor. The French sociologist and
anthropologist Marcel Mauss remarked angrily that "it is almost comical
to see little-known, poorly investigated items of folklore invoked at
the Peace Conference as proof that the territory of this or that nation
should extend over a particular area because a certain shape of
dwelling or bizarre custom is still in evidence". Archaeology,
anthropology, philology, history and a host of other sciences and arts
were invoked in an effort to substantiate a land claim. And no land
claim was subjected to a statute of limitations, no subsequent conquest
or invasion or settlement legitimised. Witness the "Dacian wars"
between Hungary and Romania over Transylvania (are the Romanians latter
day Dacians or did they invade Transylvania long after it was populated
by the Hungarians?). Witness the Israelis and the Palestinians. And,
needless to add, witness the Serbs and the Albanians, the Greeks and
the Macedonians and the Macedonians and the Bulgarians.
Thus, the modern nation-state was a reflection of something more
primordial, of human nature itself as it resonated in the national
founding myths (most of them fictitious or contrived). The
supra-national dream is to many a nightmare. Europe is fragmenting into
micro-nations while unifying its economies. These two trends are not
mutually exclusive as is widely and erroneously believed. Actually,
they are mutually reinforcing. As the modern state loses its major
economic roles and functions to a larger, supranational framework - it
loses its legitimacy and its raison d'etre.
The one enduring achievement of the state was the replacement of
allegiance to a monarch, to a social class, to a region, or to a
religion by an allegiance to a "nation". This subversive idea comes
back to haunt itself. It is this allegiance to the nation that is the
undoing of the tolerant, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, abstract modern
state. To be a nationalist is to belong to ever smaller and more
homogenous groups and to dismantle the bigger, all-inclusive polity,
which is the modern state.
Indeed, the state is losing in the battlefield of ideas to the other
two options: micro-nationalism (homogeneous and geographically
confined) and reactionary affiliation. Micro-nationalism gave birth to
Palestine and to Kosovo, to the Basque land and to Quebec, to
regionalism and to local patriotism. It is a fragmenting force. Modern
technology makes many political units economically viable despite their
minuscule size - and so they declare their autonomy and often aspire to
independence.
Reactionary Affiliation is cosmopolitan. Think about the businessman,
the scholar, the scientist, the pop star, the movie star, the
entrepreneur, the arbitrageur and the Internet. People feel affiliated
to a profession, a social class, a region, or a religion more than they
do to their state. Hence the phenomena of ex-pats, mass immigration,
international managers. This is a throwback to an earlier age when the
modern state was not yet invented. Indeed, the predicament of the
nation-state is such that going back may be the only benign way of
going forward.
(Article written on September 5, 1999 and published September 20, 1999
in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 13)
Return
The Phlegm and the Anima
An Impressionistic Canvass
The Calamity
It often rains in Skopje nowadays. Sudden, thunderous outpourings of
acidulous and gluey fluid. People say it is the pollution from 12,000
tonnes of bombs dropped 20 km from here. The unions warn of a hot
autumn. The omens are ominous. It looks like an economic crash rather
than a soft landing. Tony Blair was here a while ago. He photo
opportunities with photogenic refugees and promised the soft spoken and
dreamy eyed Prime Minister of Macedonia 20 million British Pounds. The
money never came. Blair's promise went the way of thousands of other
promises made by the good and the mighty throughout the history of this
melancholy part of the globe.
Emir Kusturice compared the Balkans to an island, drifting listlessly,
receding wedding music in the background. It is heart rending and often
provokes in me a tsunamic pity, an earthquake of goodwill. The locals
are adept at using this resonance, at taking advantage of foreigners
vulnerable to their music, to their costumes, to their rustic
shrewdness.
In 1963, upon the occasion of a particularly malicious earthquake,
which levelled Skopje - they rebuilt it from generous foreign
donations. The message sank in: foreigners love disasters, natural and
manmade. Foreigners are willing to shell hard currency for this
indulgence. The harder the catastrophe - the harder the currency. Thus,
calamities became an export industry, a major earner of foreign
exchange, the opportunity of a lifetime for a few in exchange for the
misery of the many.
The Aftermath
Music drifts in with the fragrances of decaying blossoms and with
corpulent mosquitoes. The fragmented echoes of animated discussions.
People here talk with their whole bodies. They lean forward and touch
their conversants. When they meet or depart they kiss each other on the
cheeks and hug passionately. It was, therefore strange to see the body
language of the octogenarian president of Macedonia with his much
younger Albanian counterpart. They stood apart and made diametrically
opposed declarations about the future of Kosovo. Watching the old
communist apparatchik Gligorov, I was reminded or Milosevic when he
announced the Serb victory in operation Allied Force. He stood so
rigid, as though about to break and leaned towards the camera, creating
an eerie fish lens effect. Balkanians are not proud people, they are
adaptable. But, in an effort to compensate for a deep-set inferiority
complex, they react with vanity and narcissism. Co-existence here has
never been an easy proposition and the Americans forced strange
bedfellows upon each other. Accustomed to the imposing ways of
superpowers, the Balkan bowed its head. But it is a contemptuous
gesture. Balkanians aim to win through their surrender. They always
harbour hidden agendas. Knowing this, they are also paranoid but, as
distinct from the classic pathology, they do have enemies. The Balkan
will wait until America joins Rome and Turkey. The only commodity it
has aplenty is time. So now Gligorov and Mejdani shake hands but they
both know the long knives are drawn. They both will wait for the
intruders to depart, which will them go on with that traditional
pastime of Balkan rulers: slaughtering each other.
The War Chests
Thaci found himself with plenty of returning refugees, meddlesome
peacekeepers and houses burned to their basements. He also found
himself with very little money. Rugova and Bukoshi, on the other hand,
have access to funds but very few adherents. Rugova's decline did not
start in March 1999. It started long ago when he objected even to
peaceful student demonstrations (which the Serbs found tolerable). It
was then clear that if there ever was any distinction between his
pacifism and traitorous, collaborationist cowardice - it has long
vanished. People deserted him in droves and in Rambouillet, it was
Thaci who headed the Kosovar delegation, not his elder rival.
So now Thaci needs money. One way is to collect taxes, as Rugova did.
Another is to monopolize the business interests of Kosovo. He set
himself upon this task no less ferociously than he did fighting the
Serbs. In collaboration with Albanian politicians (government
supporters) and with Macedonian politicians of Albanian descent, he
began to take over lucrative trades and economic activities both in
Kosovo and in its neighbours. The Berisha (Albanian opposition) crowd
regard him as an imminent danger. They believe his aim is to become the
President of a Greater Albania comprising Albania and Kosovo (though
not Macedonia, a new found and perhaps short lived ally). This is a
recipe for a civil war, the second one within two years in Albania. The
first one erupted after the life savings of one third of the population
were squandered by a cronyist group of investment houses in pyramid
schemes.
The Spoils
The Greeks are grabbing Macedonian property: real estate, banks,
factories, and a refinery, perhaps the Macedonian Telecom. They pay
outlandishly cheap prices. The Macedonians are on their knees, reduced
by the war to a loosely connected network of bartering businesses.
While plundering, the Greeks do not refrain from political
arm-twisting. They vetoed Macedonia's application to become the centre
of the reconstruction of Kosovo and then proceeded to propose
Thessalonica (Saloniki) - a proposal adopted by the EU. They also
refuse to call Macedonia by its constitutional name, forcing the
impossible acronym FYROM on the international community. The next
logical target is Serbia. To the Greek businessmen, Kosovo is lost due
to the brutal treatment of Albanian refugees in Greece and the
expressed pro-Serb sympathies of the Greek main street.
Thus, strange, chimeral alliances emerge. They are likely to prove as
ephemeral as their predecessors, to melt away in the searing heat of
the Balkanian summer. But while they last they give one pause. The
Russians and two NATO members, Greece and Italy, are likely to defy
America and enthusiastically embark upon the lucrative reconstruction
of devastated Serbia. Financed by German money through the inefficient
and corrupt money transfer mechanism known as the EU, German businesses
are not likely to tolerate this Christian Orthodox monopoly. They will
join the fray, to America's increasing dismay and chagrin. American
firms, on the other hand, will probably not be allowed to undo the
damage their government wrought. Left out of the game, America will try
to spoil it. It might well succeed, for it controls the strings of the
American purses known as IMF and World Bank. Americans never hesitate
to bully and to blackmail where money is involved.
The Russians are preparing to supply Serbia with new military
technology as do other rogue states. Greece is secretly negotiating
with Iran. Serb leaders visit Iraq. Russians are meeting North Koreans.
So do the Chinese. Russian aircraft breach NATO's airspace. The
Europeans are hastily forming their own defence alliance and finally
appointed Mr. PESC, the long awaited EU foreign policy supremo. The
ramblings of a new cold war (the world against the USA) are clearly
audible to the attentive ear. In the margins more minor players such as
Israel position themselves to counter what they regard as dangerous
liaisons between Pakistani, Afghani and Albanian Islamic
fundamentalist, terrorist cum drug concerns (sometimes in the guise of
aid organizations). Bin Laden is in the area. Every secret service,
every crime organization, every terrorist group, every liberation
movement, every weapons dealer, every drug pusher are here, eager not
to miss the unfolding action.
These wrangles will surely depress investors' appetites. They will not
increase the pledges in bow tied donor conferences either. Good money
(investments and international aid) rarely follows bad one (crime and
weapons trading, for example).
The Balkan countries stand to get a small fraction of the magnificent
and magnanimous and generous promises made to them in the heat of the
battle. The Balkan will be forgotten because it refuses to reform,
because it is obstreperous. The number of officials visiting will
decline. The journalists will beat a path to other blazes. The local
politicians, pampered by the likes of Clinton and the CNN will revert
unwillingly to their petty squabbles and ragged local papers. In a few
months, it is will all seem like a mirage. It will all sink into the
fertile soil of this luscious region, fertilized by countless bodies
and bloody rivulets. The great togetherness will evaporate leaving
behind the putrid fumes of re-emerging, centuries old, grudges and
suspicions. The people will complain. The leaders will thieve and
collaborate with organized crime. The criminals will prosper. The
farmers will toil their land and intellectuals will conspire. It is the
Balkans where nothing changes.
And nothing ever will.
(Article written on July 11, 1999 and published July 19, 1999
in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 4)
Return
The Dance of Jael
"Envy is forever looking upwards. It does not look sideways. In 'Facial
Justice' Hartley (1960) describes a life after a catastrophic war. A
Dictator has decreed that envy is so destructive that it has to be
eliminated. The citizens are coerced to be as alike each other as
possible. The worst crime is not envy itself but to excite envy.
'Equality and Envy - the two E's were...the positive and negative poles
on which the New State rotated' (p.12). In order to exterminate envy
everything that was enviable has been destroyed. Of course that in
itself is the very essence of envy. Neither envy nor equality are
spoken of as words but referred to as Good and Bad E. All tall
buildings had been destroyed in the war except the tower of Ely
Cathedral and none are allowed to be built - a horizontal view of life
is required. No comparisons are to be made, women are encouraged to
undertake an operation so they all looked alike, to be pretty would
excite envy. The result is that the populace loses its humanity and
becomes a non-thinking mass. The independently minded heroine, Jael,
visits the Ely and looks up at the tower and leads a dance round it.
She pays the price of having her more than averagely pretty face (an
Alpha face) changed to a Beta face by cosmetic surgery and so made
indistinguishable from the others."
(From "Cronos and His Children - Envy and Reparation" by Mary Ashwin -
Chapter II "Everyday Envy")
The distinction between fiction and non-fiction became ever subtler in
the "Underground" world of post-socialism, "After the Rain" of
communism. In a lethal embrace, in an act of unprecedented intercourse,
literature penetrated reality as only the most fervent lovers or the
most avid haters do. A topsy-turvy continent adrift among the gales of
newspeak, under the gaze of a million grey bureaucrats passing for big
brothers. A motion picture gone awry: the plot long forgotten, the
actors wondering forlornly on a dilapidated scene and the credits
flashing over and again, in an endless loop.
This crazed landscape, this party of mad hatters, where time stood
still was the result of the two great equalizers: oppression and
ideology. The substrate of numerous experiments of groups without
control, the inhabitants of these feverish lands internalised their own
predicament. The broken toys of spoiled imperial children, the guinea
pigs of scientific materialism and then of materialism only - they
strutted around, eyes wide shut, ears clogged, mouths stapled, lips
sown with the wire of terror. Everyone was equal under their occupiers,
their tormentors, and their slave masters. And everyone was equal by
decree, on pain of death or exile, by the horror-stricken conviction
called ideology. To succumb to the former was to survive - to subscribe
to the latter was to flourish. Many flourished.
The New Oxford Dictionary of English defines envy as: "A feeling of
discontented or resentful longing aroused by someone else's
possessions, qualities, or luck." And an earlier version (The Shorter
Oxford English Dictionary) adds: "Mortification and ill will occasioned
by the contemplation of another's superior advantages."
Pathological envy - the second deadly sin - is a compounded emotion. It
is brought on by the realization of some lack, deficiency, or
inadequacy in oneself. It is the result of unfavourably comparing
oneself to others: to their success, their reputation, their
possessions, their luck, and their qualities. It is misery and
humiliation and impotent rage and a tortuous, slippery path to nowhere.
The effort to break the padded walls of this self-visited purgatory
often leads to attacks on the perceived source of frustration.
Pathological envy is THE driving force of post-communist Central and
Eastern Europe. Unable to cope with the sudden shift in values from
enforced and artificial equality to primitive, pirate capitalism - the
populace retreated to acrimony and bitterness. Faced with the chasmic
inequalities engendered by the serial collective robberies known as
"privatisation" - it reacted with suppressed rage, with despair, with
the multiple sadness which is nostalgia. The land has split between a
colourful, dynamic, rapacious and omnivorous class - and the sepia-like
and quaint backdrop of their compatriots. As the castles of the former
rose - so were the abodes of the latter humbled.
The resentment led to fears of abandoning one's self-control, of
confronting one's rulers and their cronies, of losing even the little
one was allowed to possess. It was a muted mutiny, a rebel-less
rebellion, a static trip from guilt to hate. To maintain these seething
undercurrents from erupting, to avoid the volcanic tremors that precede
every revolution - behaviour was formalized and ritualised. Speech
became ever vaguer and ambiguous. Effective communication was halted.
The community splintered and the very fabric of society was consumed by
this massive act of dissociation.
Pathological envy mutated into solutions the envious could live with.
Some sought to imitate or even emulate the newfound heroes of the
capitalist revolution. They immersed themselves in conspicuous
consumption, the badly matched purchases of the nouveaux riches replete
with the vulgar manners of unrefined power. They adhered to coarse
materialism with its confusion of ends and means. They suffered the
ever-present agitation of envy, the constant comparison to one's
superiors, the plagued rat race. To get rich quick through schemes of
crime and corruption is thought by these people to be the epitome of
cleverness (providing one does not get caught), the sport of living, a
winked-at vice, a spice.
Yet others embarked on paths of rivalry and enmity and destruction.
This hydra has many heads. From scratching the paint of new cars and
flattening their tyres, to spreading vicious gossip, to media-hyped
arrests of successful and rich businessmen, to wars against advantaged
neighbours. The stifling, condensed vapours of envy cannot be
dispersed. They invade their victims and snatch their rageful eyes,
their calculating souls, they guide their hands in evil doings and dip
their tongues in vitriol. This is the day-to-day existence in places as
far apart as Moscow and the Balkans. A constant hiss, a tangible
malice, the piercing of a thousand eyes. The imminence and immanence of
violence. The poisoned joy of depriving the other of that which you do
not or cannot have.
There are those who idealize the successful and the rich and the lucky.
They attribute to them super-human, almost divine, qualities. They
think of serendipity as earned, of work as bestowed, of success as
deserved and reserved to the deserving. In an effort to justify the
agonizing disparities between themselves and others, they humble
themselves as they elevate the others. They reduce and diminish their
own gifts, they disparage their own achievements, they degrade their
own possessions and look with disdain and contempt upon their nearest
and dearest, who are unable to discern their fundamental shortcomings.
They feel worthy only of abasement and punishment. Besieged by guilt
and remorse, voided of self-esteem, self-hating and self-deprecating -
this is by far the more dangerous species. For he who derives
contentment from his own humiliation cannot but derive happiness from
the downfall of others. Indeed, most of them end up driving the objects
of their own devotion and adulation to destruction and decrepitude.
But the most common reaction is the good old cognitive dissonance. In
Central and Eastern Europe, entire societies are in its grip. It is to
prefer the belief that the grapes are sour to the admission of their
desirability. These people devalue the source of their frustration and
envy. They find faults, unattractive features, high costs to pay,
immorality in everything they really most desire and aspire to and in
everyone who has attained that which they so often can't. They walk
around critical and self-righteous, inflated with a justice of their
making and secure in the wisdom of being what they are rather than what
they could have been and really wish to be. They make a virtue of
abstention, of wishful constipation, of judgmental neutrality, this
oxymoron, the favourite of the disabled.
Topped by a thin layer of coagulated fat, a bubble of enraged and
maddened envy is boiling underneath - from Murmansk to Athens and from
Prague to Dresden. Will it burst and spill over or will it only noisily
release its steam is anybody's guess. It is a force to reckon with. The
tide of capitalism has lifted few yachts and no one else's boats.
People feel cheated. They feel used and abused. They feel conned out of
their dignity and their possessions and their future. They look around
and see island castles surrounded by oceans of physical and moral
filth. This is no decadence because it has no aesthetic values to
ameliorate it. It is as ugly as the survival of the thiefest. As
Central and Eastern Europe engages, for the first time, in serious
restructuring - the social costs will mount dramatically and so will
inequality. The process can be reversed only by the redistribution of
wealth. But that it will be achieved through progressive taxation
rather than through a bloodbath is not a foregone conclusion.
(Article written on September 26, 1999 and published October 11, 1999
in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 16)
Return
Homo Balkanus
How does one respond to a torrent of belligerent correspondence from
Balkanians arguing against the belligerence of Balkanians asserted by
one in one's articles? Were it not sad, it surely would have been
farcical. Only yesterday (August 17th, 1999 - five months after the
Kosovo conflict) Macedonian papers argued fiercely, vehemently and
threateningly against an apparently innocuous remark by Albania's Prime
Minister. He said that all Albanians, wherever they are, should share
the same curriculum of studies. A preparatory step on the way to a
Greater Albania perhaps? In this region of opaque mirrors and "magla"
(fog) it is possible. And what is possible surely IS.
I do not believe in the future of this part of the world only because I
know its history too well. Every psychologist will tell you that past
violent behaviour is the best predictor of future recidivism. Homo
Balkanus is lifted straight off the rustling pages of the Diagnostic
and Statistics Manual (DSM) version IV (1994) - the bible of the
psychiatric profession:
"A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behaviour), need for
admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and
present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the
following:
1. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates
achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without
commensurate achievements);
2. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power,
brilliance, beauty, or ideal love;
3. Believes that he or she is 'special' and unique and can only be
understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status
people (or institutions);
4. Requires excessive admiration;
5. Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of
especially favourable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her
expectations;
6. Is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of
others to achieve his or her own ends;
7. Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the
feelings and needs of others;
8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious
of him or her;
9. Shows arrogant, haughty behaviours or attitudes."
Narcissism is a result of stunted growth and of childhood abuse. It is
a reactive pattern, the indelible traces of an effort to survive
against all odds, against bestial repression and all-pervasive decay.
Brutally suppressed by the Turks for hundreds of years and then by
communism in some countries and by cruel, capricious banana republic
regimes in others - Homo Balkanus has grown to be a full-fledged
narcissist.
The nation state structure and ideology enthusiastically adopted by
Homo Balkanus in the wake of the collapse of the rotten Ottoman edifice
- has proven to be a costly mistake. Tribal village societies are not
fit for the consumption of abstract models of political organization.
This is as true in Africa as it is in the Balkans. The first allegiance
of Homo Balkanus is to his family, his clan, and his village. Local
patriotism was never really supplanted by patriotism. Homo Balkanus
shares an Ottoman unconscious with his co-regionists. The "authorities"
were and are always perceived to be a brutal, menacing and
unpredictable presence, a natural power, to be resisted by the equal
employment of cunning and corruption. Turkish habits die hard. The
natives find it difficult not to bribe their way through their own
officialdom, to pay taxes, not to litter, to volunteer, in short: to be
citizens, rather than occupants or inhabitants. Their
passive-aggressive instincts are intact and on autopilot.
The Balkanian experiment with nation states has visited only misery and
carnage upon the heads of its perpetrators. Borders tracked
convulsively the movements of half-nomad populations. This instability
of boundaries led to ethnic cleansing, to numerous international
congresses, to fitful wars. In an effort to justify a distinct
existence and identity, thousands of "scholars" embarked on Herculean
efforts of inventing histories for their newly emergent nations.
Inevitably, these histories conflicted and led to yet more bloodshed. A
land fertilized by blood produces harvests of bloated corpses.
In the Balkans people fight for their very own identity. They aspire to
purity, albeit racial, and to boundaries, albeit of the abstract kind.
It is, perhaps, the kernel of this Greek tragedy: that real people are
sacrificing real people on the altar of the abstract. It is a battle of
tastes, a clash of preferences, an Armageddon of opinions, judgements,
and lessons. Armies are still moved by ancient events, by symbols, by
fiery speeches, by abstract, diffuse notions. It is a land devoid of
its present, where the past and future reign supreme. No syllogism, no
logic, no theory can referee that which cannot be decided but by the
compelling thrust of the sword. "We versus They" - they, the aliens.
Threatened by the otherness of others, Homo Balkanus succumbs to the
protection of the collective. A dual track: an individualist against
the authorities - a mindless robot against all others, the foreigners,
the strangers, the occupiers. The violent acting out of this
schizophrenia is often referred to as "the history of the Balkans".
This spastic nature was further exacerbated by the egregious behaviour
of the superpowers. Unfortunately possessed of strategic import, the
Balkan was ravaged by geopolitics. Turks and Bulgarians and Hungarians
and Austrians and Russians and Britons and Germans and Communists and
the warplanes of NATO - the apocalyptic horsemen in the mountains and
rivers and valleys and sunsets of this otherworldly, tortured piece of
land. Raped by its protectors, impregnated by the demon seeds of global
interests and their ruthless pursuit - the Balkan was transformed into
a horror chamber of amputated, zombie nations, a veritable hellish
scene. Many a Pomeranian grenadier bequeathed their bones to the
Balkans but Pomeranian grenadiers came and went while the people of the
Balkan languished.
Thus, it was not difficult to foster a "We" against every "They" (or
imagined "They"). A crossroads of fault lines, a confluence of tectonic
clashes - the Balkan always obliged.
Religion came handy in this trade of hate. Orthodox Serbs fought Muslim
Serbs in Bosnia (the latter were forced to convert by the Turks
hundreds of years ago). Catholic Croats fought Orthodox Serbs. And
Bulgarians (a Turkic tribe) expelled the Turks in 1989, having
compelled them to change their Muslim names to Bulgarian sounding ones
in 1984.
Race was useful in the agitated effort to prevail. Albanians are of
Illyrian origin. The Greeks regard the Macedonians as upstart Slavs.
The Bulgarians regard the Macedonians as rebel Bulgarians. The
Macedonian regard the Bulgarians as Tartars (that is, Barbarian and
Turkish). The Slovenes and the Croats and, yes, the Hungarians claim
not to belong in this cauldron of seething, venomous emotions.
And culture was used abundantly in the Balkan conflicts. Where was the
Cyrillic alphabet invented (Macedonia, Greece, Bulgaria) and by whom
(Greeks, Macedonians, Bulgarians). Are some nations mere inventions?
(The Bulgarians say this about the Macedonians). Are some languages one
and the same? Minorities are either cleansed or denied out of
existence. The Greek still claim that there are no minorities in
Greece, only Greeks with different religions. The Bulgars in Greece
used to be "Bulgarophone Greeks". The Balkan is the eternal hunting
grounds of oxymorons, tautologies and logical fallacies.
It is here that intellectuals usually step in (see my article: "The
Poets and the Eclipse"). But the Balkan has no intelligentsia in the
Russian or even American sense. It has no one to buck the trend, to
play the non-conforming, to rattle, to provoke, to call upon one's
conscience. It does not have this channel to (other) ideas and view
called "intellectuals". It is this last point, which makes me the most
pessimistic. The Balkan is a body without a brain.
(Article written on August 8, 1999 and published September 6, 1999
in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 11)
Return
The MinMaj Rule
I have a Roma (gypsy) cleaning lady. She cleans my house every
fortnight. She is nice and well spoken. She values education and good
manners. She is spotless, obsessively purgatory, and compulsively tidy.
And she hates "shiptars" (the derogatory name assigned to Macedonian
Albanians). They are dirty, she says, and criminal and they have too
many children. They don't respect their women. She is afraid of them.
Her eyes glow with the gratification of the underdog turned top dog, if
only verbally, if only for a while, if only while cleansing my house.
This is the way it is, a chain of abuse, a torrent of prejudice, an
iron curtain of malice and stereotyping. Czechs portray "their" gypsies
with the same lingual brushstrokes, the same venomous palette, a
canvass of derision and atavistic, reflexive hatred.
In the Balkans reigns supreme the Law of the MinMaj. It is simple and
it was invariably manifested throughout history. It is this: "Wars
erupt whenever and wherever a country has a minority of the same
ethnicity as the majority in its neighbouring country."
Consider Israel - surrounded by Arab countries, it has an Arab minority
of its own, having expelled (ethnically cleansed) hundreds of thousands
more. It has fought 6 wars with its neighbours and (good intentions
notwithstanding) looks set to fight more. It is subjugated to the Law
of the MinMaj, enslaved by its steady and nefarious domination.
Or take Nazi Germany. World War Two was the ultimate manifestation of
the MinMaj Law. German minorities throughout Europe were either used by
Germany - or actively collaborated with it - to justify one Anschluss
after another. Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Russia - a
parade of Big Brotherly intervention by Germany on behalf of allegedly
suppressed kinfolk. Lebensraum and Volkdeutsch were twin pillars of
Nazi ideology.
And, of course, there is Yugoslavia, its charred remnants agonizingly
writhing in a post Kosovo world. Serbia fought Croatia and Bosnia and
Kosovo to protect besieged and hysterical local Serbs. Croats fought
Serbs and Bosnians to defend dilapidated Croat settlements. Albanians
fought the Serbs through the good services of Kosovars in order to
protect Kosovars. And the fighting is still on. This dismembered
organism, once a flourishing country, dazed and scorched, still
attempts to blindly strike its former members, inebriated by its own
blood. Such is the power of the MinMaj.
There are three ways out from the blind alley to which the MinMaj Rule
inevitably and invariably leads its adherents. One exit is through
ethnic cleansing, the other via self-determination, the third is in
establishing a community, a majority of minorities.
Ethnic cleansing is the safest route. It is final, irreversible, just,
fast, easy to carry out and preventive as much as curative. It need not
be strewn with mass graves and smouldering villages. It can be done
peacefully, by consent or with the use of minimal force. It can be part
of a unilateral transfer or of a bilateral exchange of population.
There are many precedents - Germans in the Ukraine and in
Czechoslovakia, Turks in Bulgaria, Jews in the Arab countries. None of
them left willingly or voluntarily. All were the victims of
pathological nostalgia, deep, disconsolate grieving and the
post-traumatic shock of being uprooted and objectified. But they
emigrated, throngs of millions of people, planeloads, trainloads,
cartloads and carloads of them and they reached their destinations
alive and able to start all over again - which is more than can be said
about thousands of Kosovar Albanians. Ethnic cleansing has many faces,
brutality is not its integrated feature.
The Wilsonian ideal of self-determination is rarely feasible or
possible - though, when it is, it is far superior to any other
resolution of intractable ethnic conflicts. It does tend to produce
political and economic stillborns, though. Ultimately, these offspring
of noble principle merge again with their erstwhile foes within customs
unions, free trade agreements, currency unions. They are subsumed in
other economic, political, or military alliances and gladly surrender
part of that elusive golden braid, their sovereignty. Thus, becoming an
independent political entity is, to most, a rite of passage,
adolescence, heralding the onset of political adulthood and
geopolitical and economic maturity.
The USA and, to a lesser degree, the UK, France and Germany are fine
examples of the third way. A majority of minorities united by common
rules, beliefs and aspirations. Those are tension filled structures
sustained by greed or vision or fear or hope and sometimes by the very
tensions that they generate. No longer utopian, it is a realistic model
to emulate.
It is only when ethnic cleansing is combined with self-determination
that a fracturing of the solutions occurs. Atrocities are the vile
daughters of ideals. Armed with stereotypes - those narcissistic
defence mechanisms that endow their propagators with a fleeting sense
of superiority - an ethnic group defines itself negatively, in
opposition to another. Self-determination is employed to facilitate
ethnic cleansing rather than to prevent it. Actually, it is the very
act of ethnic cleansing which validates the common identity, which
forms the myth and the ethos that is national history, which
perpetrates itself by conferring resilience upon the newly determined
and by offering a common cause and the means to feel efficient,
functional and victorious in carrying it out.
There are many variants of this malignant, brutal, condemnable,
criminal and inefficient form of ethnic cleansing. Bred by manic and
hysterical nationalists, fed by demagogues, nourished by the hitherto
deprived and humiliated - this cancerous mix of definition by negation
wears many guises. It is often clad in legal attire. Israel has a Law
of Return, which makes an instant citizen out of every spouse of every
Russian Jew while denying this privilege to Arabs born on its soil.
South Africa had apartheid. Nazi Germany had the Nuremberg Laws. The
Czech Republic had the infamous Benes Decrees. But ethnic cleansing can
be economic (ask the Chinese in Asia and the Indians in Africa). It can
be physical (Croatia, Kosovo). It has myriad facets.
The West is to blame for this confusion. By offering all three
solutions as mutually inclusive rather than mutually exclusive - it has
been responsible for a lot of strife and misery. But, to its credit, it
has learned its lesson. In Kosovo it defended the right of the indigent
and (not so indigent but) resident Albanians to live in peace and
plough their land in peace and bring forth children in peace and die in
peace. But it has not protected their right to self-determination. It
has not mixed the signals. As a result the message came through loud
and clear. And, for the first time in many years, people tuned in and
listened. And this, by far, is the most important achievement of
Operation Allied Force.
(Article written on July 4, 1999 and published July 12, 1999
in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 3)
Return
The Balkans between Omerta and Vendetta
On the Criminality of Transition
In a State Department briefing on Thursday, August 5th, 1999, the
spokesman of this venerable and ever-so-truthful organ of the American
administration, James Rubin, said:
"We have supported and continue to support the regime in Montenegro
that is a democratic regime that has pursued a democratic course. We do
believe that Milosevic's efforts to consolidate power have led to
repeated violations of the Yugoslav federal constitution, in particular
the rights and privileges of Montenegro.
In particular, Belgrade has sought to strip Montenegro's constitutional
rights and powers and has prevented Montenegro from playing its
constitutional role in the federal government. We continue to believe
that Montenegro's leaders have demonstrated a measured and rational
approach to political and economic reform, which we support. We commend
their efforts to work within the FRY for reforms that would bring
democracy and a better life to all Yugoslav citizens.
To achieve that objective, we've been providing them assistance, we've
been exempting them from the effect of certain policies that apply to
Belgrade and the people of Serbia. We worked very, very hard during the
war to avoid any unnecessary damage to facilities or people in
Montenegro as a result of the air war. So we have been showing, I
think, great efforts to try to build up the democratic efforts that
President Djukanovic has shown in Montenegro. We think that they should
continue to work within Yugoslavia to ensure their rights are
protected."
The war in Kosovo and the impending war in Montenegro and the wars that
were in Croatia and Bosnia - were all gangland warfare. These were
skirmishes between gangs of criminals, disguised as statesmen,
politicians, members of "parliaments" and businessmen. Some of them
were protecting their turf - others were trying to usurp it and they
all made a killing, often literally. It is the same the world over -
from Lebanon to Myanmar, from Sierra Leone to Nigeria and from Sarajevo
and its ephemeral Stability Pact to the killing fields of Pristina.
Crime gangs, Mafiosi, local versions of omertas and vendettas, black
hands and red rivulets of the cheapest liquid of them all: blood.
Shadowy dealings, drug trafficking, white slavery, smuggling and
forfeit goods are all intertwined with political power in the Balkans.
Thaci we discussed elsewhere. Milosevic we discussed everywhere. But
Djukanovic is portrayed as different - more gentlemanly, "democratic",
a protector of civil rights.
Nothing can be further from the truth. The West - notably the USA - is
in the habit of creating pairs of villains and heroes, monsters and
saints where there are none. It provides for good soundbites, it raises
the fighting spirits at home and it focuses attention and energy on the
enemy. Very often, the spin-doctors are caught in their own whirlwind
and with them - if they happen to be American - the rest of the world.
Shrewd villagers such as all Balkan politicians are, have caught on to
this self-delusion. They pose as democrats, autocrats, strong men,
underdogs - anything to get Western aid and investment flowing. It is
currently very fashionable and expedient to be a democrat - so Mr.
Djukanovic is a democrat. And the West duly delivers the goods:
international recognition, money, and political support.
Milka Tadic is the Editor of the popular (and, as you will see,
independent) Montenegrin magazine "Monitor". This week, she wrote about
Djukanovich (in "Currency Wars", in IWPR number 63):
"Whenever Djukanovic, then Montenegro's Prime Minister, demanded
economic liberalization and more economic independence, Milosevic would
close the border and block trade between Serbia and Montenegro. In
retaliation, Djukanovic opened Montenegro's borders with Italy, to
cigarette smuggling, and with Albania, for oil imports. Djukanovic also
liberalized the import of foreign, second-hand cars - many of them
stolen vehicles from Western Europe that Montenegrins bought from the
Bosnian-Croat mafia, in border towns in Bosnia. Taxes from imported
cars, the smuggling of cigarettes and oil, provided Djukanovic with the
hard currency to replenish the republic's coffers and begin to chart an
independent course away from Belgrade. In economic terms, this tiny
republic was becoming less and less dependent on its partner in the
Yugoslav federation. ... As NATO launched its bombing campaign, the
Yugoslav Army took over control of the Montenegrin border crossings and
custom posts, banning even the entrance of humanitarian aid; speed
boats smuggling cigarettes between Montenegro and Italy could no longer
break the blockade; and the border with Albania was also closed.
Djukanovic was facing economic disaster and was only saved by the end
of the war, since when Montenegro has resumed its dubious trade with
its neighbours."
Hence the love affair with the West.
Human vice is the most certain thing after death and taxes, to
paraphrase Benjamin Franklin. The only variety of economic activity,
which will surely survive even a nuclear holocaust, is bound to be
crime. Prostitution, gambling, drugs and, in general, expressly illegal
activities generate c. 400 billion USD annually to their perpetrators,
thus making crime the third biggest industry on Earth (after the
medical and pharmaceutical industries).
Many of the so-called Economies in Transition and of HPICs (Highly
Indebted Poor Countries) do resemble post-nuclear-holocaust ashes. GDPs
in most of these economies either tumbled nominally or in real terms by
more than 60% in the space of less than a decade. The average monthly
salary is the equivalent of the average daily salary of the German
industrial worker. The GDP per capita - with very few notable
exceptions - is around 20% of the EU's average. These are the telltale
overt signs of a comprehensive collapse of the infrastructure and of
the export and internal markets. Mountains of internal debt, sky-high
interest rates, cronyism, other forms of corruption, environmental,
urban and rural dilapidation - characterize these economies.
Into this vacuum - the interregnum between centrally planned and free
market economies - crept crime. In most of these countries criminals
run at least half the economy, are part of the governing elites
(influencing them behind the scenes through money contributions,
outright bribes, or blackmail) and - through the mechanism of money
laundering - infiltrate slowly the legitimate economy.
What gives crime the edge, the competitive advantage versus the older,
ostensibly better established elites?
The free market does. Criminals are much better equipped to deal with
the onslaught of this new conceptual beast, the mechanism of the
market, than most other economic players in these tattered economies
are.
Criminals, by the very nature of their vocation, were always private
entrepreneurs. They were never state owned or subjected to any kind of
central planning. Thus, they became the only group in society that was
not corrupted by these un-natural inventions. They invested their own
capital in small to medium size enterprises and ran them later as any
American manager would have done. To a large extent the criminals,
single handedly, created a private sector in these derelict economies.
Having established a private sector business, devoid of any involvement
of the state, the criminal-entrepreneurs proceeded to study the market.
Through primitive forms of market research (neighbourhood activists)
they were able to identify the needs of their prospective customers, to
monitor them in real time and to respond with agility to changes in the
patterns of supply and demand. Criminals are market-animals and they
are geared to respond to its gyrations and vicissitudes. Though they
were not likely to engage in conventional marketing and advertising,
they always stayed attuned to the market's vibrations and signals. They
changed their product mix and their pricing to fit fluctuations in
demand and supply.
Criminals have proven to be good organizers and managers. They have
very effective ways of enforcing discipline in the workplace, of
setting revenue targets, of maintaining a flexible hierarchy combined
with rigid obeisance - with very high upward mobility and a clear
career path. A complex system of incentives and disincentives drives
the workforce to dedication and industriousness. The criminal rings are
well run conglomerates and the more classic industries would have done
well to study their modes of organization and management. Everything -
from sales through territorially exclusive licences (franchises) to
effective "stock" options - has been invented in the international
crime organizations long before it acquired the respectability of the
corporate boardroom.
The criminal world has replicated those parts of the state, which were
rendered ineffective by unrealistic ideology or by pure corruption. The
court system makes a fine example. The criminals instituted their own
code of justice ("law") and their own court system. A unique - and
often irreversible - enforcement arm sees to it that respect towards
these indispensable institutions is maintained. Effective - often
interactive - legislation, an efficient court system, backed by ominous
and ruthless agents of enforcement - ensure the friction-free
functioning of the giant wheels of crime. Crime has replicated numerous
other state institutions. Small wonder that when the state
disintegrated - crime was able to replace it with little difficulty.
The same pattern is discernible in certain parts of the world where
terrorist organizations duplicate the state and overtake it, in time.
Schools, clinics, legal assistance, family support, taxation, the court
system, transportation and telecommunication services, banking and
industry - all have a criminal doppelganger.
To secure this remarkable achievement - the underworld had to procure
and then maintain - infrastructure and technologies. Indeed, criminals
are great at innovating and even more formidable at making use of
cutting edge technologies. There is not a single technological advance,
invention or discovery that criminals were not the first to utilize or
the first to contemplate and to grasp its full potential. There are
enormous industries of services rendered to the criminal in his
pursuits. Accountants and lawyers, forgers and cross border guides,
weapons experts and bankers, mechanics and hit-men - all stand at the
disposal of the average criminal. The choice is great and prices are
always negotiable. These auxiliary professionals are no different to
their legitimate counterparts, despite the difference in subject
matter. A body of expertise, know-how and acumen has accumulated over
centuries of crime and is handed down the generations in the criminal
universities known as jailhouses and penitentiaries. Roads less
travelled, countries more lenient, passports to be bought, sold, or
forged, how to manuals, classified ads, goods and services on offer and
demand - all feature in this mass media cum educational (mostly verbal)
bulletins. This is the real infrastructure of crime. As with more
mundane occupations, human capital is what counts.
Criminal activities are hugely profitable (though wealth accumulation
and capital distribution are grossly non-egalitarian). Money is stashed
away in banking havens and in more regular banks and financial
institutions all over the globe. Electronic Document Interchange and
electronic commerce transformed what used to be an inconveniently slow
and painfully transparent process - into a speed-of-light here-I-am,
here-I-am-gone type of operation. Money is easily movable and virtually
untraceable. Special experts take care of that: tax havens, off shore
banks, money transactions couriers with the right education and a free
spirit. This money, in due time and having cooled off - is reinvested
in legitimate activities. Crime is a major engine of economic growth in
some countries (where drugs are grown or traded, or in countries such
as Italy, in Russia and elsewhere in CEE). In many a place, criminals
are the only ones who have any liquidity at all. The other, more
visible, sectors of the economy are wallowing in the financial drought
of a demonetised economy. People and governments tend to lose both
their scruples and their sense of fine distinctions under these unhappy
circumstances. They welcome any kind of money to ensure their very
survival. This is where crime comes in. In Central and Eastern Europe
the process was code-named: "privatisation".
Moreover, most of the poor economies are also closed economies. They
are the economies of nations xenophobic, closed to the outside world,
with currency regulations, limitations on foreign ownership,
constrained (instead of free) trade. The vast majority of the populace
of these economic wretches has never been further than the neighbouring
city - let alone outside the borders of their countries. Freedom of
movement is still restricted. The only ones to have travelled freely -
mostly without the required travel documents - were the criminals.
Crime is international. It involves massive, intricate and
sophisticated operations of export and import, knowledge of languages,
extensive and frequent trips, an intimate acquaintance with world
prices, the international financial system, demand and supply in
various markets, frequent business negotiations with foreigners and so
on. This list would fit any modern businessman as well. Criminals are
international businessmen. Their connections abroad coupled with their
connections with the various elites inside their country and coupled
with their financial prowess - made them the first and only true
businessmen of the economies in transition. There simply was no one
else qualified to fulfil this role - and the criminals stepped in
willingly.
They planned and timed their moves as they always do: with shrewdness,
an uncanny knowledge of human psychology and relentless cruelty. There
was no one to oppose them - and so they won the day. It will take one
or more generations to get rid of them and to replace them by a more
civilized breed of entrepreneurs. But it will not happen overnight.
In the 19th century, the then expanding USA went through the same
process. Robber barons seized economic opportunities in the Wild East
and in the Wild West and really everywhere else. Morgan, Rockefeller,
Pullman, Vanderbilt - the most ennobled families of latter day America
originated with these rascals. But there is one important difference
between the USA at that time and Central and Eastern Europe today. A
civic culture with civic values and an aspiration to, ultimately,
create a civic society permeated the popular as well as the highbrow
culture of America. Criminality was regarded as a shameful
stepping-stone on the way to an orderly society of learned, civilized,
law-abiding citizens. This cannot be said about Russia, for instance.
The criminal there is, if anything, admired and emulated. The language
of business in countries in transition is suffused with the criminal
parlance of violence. The next generation is encouraged to behave
similarly because no clear (not to mention well embedded) alternative
is propounded. There is no - and never was - a civic tradition in these
countries, a Bill of Rights, a veritable Constitution, a modicum of
self rule, a true abolition of classes and nomenclatures. The future is
grim because the past was grim. Used to being governed by capricious,
paranoiac, criminal tyrants - these nations know no better. The current
criminal class seems to them to be a natural continuation and extension
of generations-long trends. That some criminals are members of the new
political, financial and industrial elites (and vice versa) - surprises
them not.
(Article written on August 11, 1999 and published August 23, 1999
in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issue 9)
Return
The Myth of Great Albania
Introduction
To the politicians of the Balkans - almost without exception corrupt
and despised by their own constituencies - the myth of Great Albania
comes handy. It keeps the phobic Macedonians, the disdainful Serbs and
the poor and crime ridden Albanians united and submissive - each group
for differing reasons.
To reiterate, it is the belief that people of Albanian extract,
wherever they may be, regard their domicile as part of a Great Albania
and undertake all efforts necessary to secure such an outcome. Thus, to
mention one example, Kosovo should be part of this Great Albania, so
the myth goes, because prior to 1912, when the Serbs occupied it,
Kosovo has administratively been part of an Ottoman mandated Albania.
Sali Berisha - a former Prime Minister of Albania - talks ominously
about an "Albanian Federation". The younger, allegedly more urbane
Pandeli Majko, the current Prime Minister of Albania, raises the idea
(?) of a uniform curriculum for all Albanian pupils and students,
wherever they may reside. Albanians in Macedonia make it a point to fly
Albanian flags conspicuously and of every occasion. This could have
well been a plausible scenario had it not been for two facts. First
that there is no such thing as homogeneous "Albanians" and second that
Great Albania is without historical precedent.
Albanians are comprised of a few ethnic groups of different creeds.
There are catholic Albanians - like Mother Theresa - and Muslim
Albanians - Like Hashim Thaci. There are Tosks - southern Albanians who
speak a (nasal) dialect of Albanian and there are Gegs - northern
Albanians (and Kosovars) who speak another dialect, which has little in
common with Tosk (at least to my ears). Tosks don't like Gegs and Gegs
detest Tosks. In a region where tribal and village loyalties
predominate these are pertinent and important facts.
The Kosovars are considered by their Albanian "brethren" (especially by
the Tosks, but also by Albanian Gegs) to be cold, unpleasant, filthy
rich cheats. Albanians - Tosks and Gegs alike - are considered by the
Kosovars to be primitive, ill-mannered bandits. There is no love lost
between all these groups. When the crisis brought on by Operation
Allied Force started, the local Albanian population charged the
refugees amidst them with exorbitant (not to say extortionate) prices
for such necessities as a roof over their head, food and cigarettes.
When the UN mandate (read: the KLA mandate) was established, the
Albanians rushed to export their brand of crime and banditry to Kosovo
and to prey on its local population. No Macedonian - however radical -
will dare say about the Albanians what my Kosovar contacts say. They
nonchalantly and matter of factly attribute to them the most heinous
crimes and uncivilized behaviour. Kosovars had - and are still having -
an excruciating experience in Albania during this crisis. The lesson
(being learned by Kosovars since Albania opened up to them in 1990)
will not be easily forgotten or forgiven. Albanians reciprocate by
portraying the Kosovars as cynical, inhuman, money making terminators,
emotionless wealthy predators.
This is not to say that Albanians on both sides of the border do not
share the same national dreams and aspirations. Kosovar intellectuals
were watching Albanian TV and reading Albanian papers even throughout
the Stalinist period of Enver Hoxha, the long time Albanian dictator.
Albanian nationalists never ceased regarding Kosovo as an integral part
of an Albanian motherland. But as the decades passed by, as the
dialects metamorphesized, as the divide grew wider, as the political
systems diverged and as the political and cultural agendas became more
distinct - Kosovars became more and more Kosovars and less and less
mainland Albanians.
This historical, 80 year-old rift was exacerbated by the abyss between
the Enver Hoxha regime and its Tito counterpart. The former -
impoverished, paranoiac, xenophobic, hermetically isolated, violent.
The latter - relatively enlightened, economically sprightly, open to
the world and dynamic. As a result, Kosovar houses are three times as
big as Albanian ones and Kosovars used to be (up to the Kosovo
conflict) three times richer (in terms of GDP per capita). Kosovars
crossing into Albania during the Hoxha regime were often jailed and
tortured by its fearsome secret police. A Kosovar - Xhaferr Deva -
served as Minister of the Interior in the hated WW2 government in
Albania, which collaborated wholeheartedly with the Nazis. Albanians,
in general, were much more reserved and suspicious towards the Germans
(who occupied Albania from 1943, after the Italian change of heart).
Only Kosovars welcomed them as liberators from Serb serfdom (as did
Albanians in Macedonia to a lesser extent). This aforementioned Deva
was responsible for the most unspeakable atrocities against the
Albanian population in Albania proper. It did not render the Kosovars
more popular. In Albania proper, three anti-fascist resistance
movements - the Albanian Communist Party, Balli Kombetar (the National
Front) and Legaliteti (Legality, a pro-Zug faction) fought against the
occupiers since 1941. The Communists seized control of the country at
the end of 1944.
Thus, the forced re-union was a culture shock to both. The Kosovars
were stunned by the living conditions, misery and lawlessness of
Albania proper. The Albanians were envious and resentful of their
guests and regarded them as legitimate objects for self-enrichment.
There were, needless to say, selfless exceptions to the egotistic rule.
But I cannot think of any right now.
Historically, there was never a "Great Albania" to hark back to.
Albania was created in 1912 (its borders finally settled in 1913) in
response to Austro-Hungarian demands. It never encouraged Kosovo to
secede. The Albanian King Zog suppressed the activities of Kosovar
irredentist movements in his country in between the two world wars.
Albania, mired in the twin crises of economy and identity - had little
mind or heart for Kosovo.
But this was the culmination of a much longer, convoluted and
fascinating history.
From Illyrium to Skanderberg
There is very little dispute among serious (that is, non-Greek,
non-Macedonian and non-Serb) scholars that the Albanians are an ancient
people, the descendants of the Illyrians or (as a small minority
insists) the Thracians. The Albanian language is a rather newer
development (less than 1500 years-old) - but it is also traced back
either to Thracian or to Illyrian. In a region obsessed with history,
real and (especially) invented, these 4000 year-old facts are of
enormous and practical import.
Ironically, the Illyrians were an ethnic mishmash that inhabited all of
the former Yugoslavia and parts of Greece (Epirus). There were also
major differences between the Illyrians of the highlands (the current
Albania) - isolated and backward - and those of the lowland, the
worldly and civilized. But these distinctions pale in comparison to the
praise heaped on the Illyrians by their contemporaries. They were
considered to be brave warriors and generous hosts. They mined their
rich land for iron, copper, gold and silver and, despite being pagan,
they buried their dead because they believed in the afterlife and its
rewards or punishments. In their liburnae - slim lined, very fast
galleys - they sailed and developed marine trade. The Romans adopted
the design of their vessels and even kept the name Liburnian.
Durres and Vlore were really established by the Greeks 2500 years ago.
The former was called Epidamnus, the latter (actually, a settlement a
few kilometres away) Apollonia. It was part of a Greek colonization
drive that effected lands as far away as Asia Minor in today's Turkey.
As was the usual case, the Greeks traded their superior civilization
and culture for the superior administrative and economic skills of the
natives. It was no coincidence that Illyrian political organization was
concurrent with the Greek presence. It started as defence alliances and
ended as kingdoms (the Enkalayes, the Taulantes, the Epirotes, the
Ardianes). And the enemy - even then - were the Macedonians under
Philip the Second and his son Alexander the Great.
But the Macedonian empire was short lived and was superseded by the far
superior and self-conscious Romans. In 229, the Illyrians (commanded by
a woman, Queen Teuta) were almost wiped out by Roman armies advancing
to the Adriatic. It was the beginning of the damaging involvement of
the superpowers in the area. Exactly 60 years later, Illyrium was no
more. Rome prevailed and ruled the land now known as Illyricum.
Those were a good 600 years. Rome - as opposed to Ottoman Empire - was
a benign, enlightened, laissez faire type of loose assemblage of
taxpayers and tax collectors. Art and culture and philosophy and even
the Illyrian tongue and Illyrian civilization flourished. It was a
rich, materially endowed period in which citizens found sufficient
leisure to indulge in all manner of Eastern cults, such as Christianity
or the cult of Mithra (the Persian god of light). Christianity competed
head on with the Illyrian pagan divinities and by 58 AD it was so
strong that it was able to establish its own bishopric in Dyrrhachium
(formerly Apollonia). This was followed by a few Episcopal seats. It
was also followed by intolerance, bigotry, hypocrisy and persecution,
as all institutional religions go. The Roman and Greek heritage of live
and let live, of art, of the aesthetics of the human body, of nature -
in short: Hellenism - was strangled by the ever more obscure and
dogmatic brand of Christianity that pervaded Byzantium until the
Iconoclastic Controversy of 732. The emperor Leo III actually did the
Albanian Church a great favour by detaching it from under the authority
of the Roman Pope and placing it under the more humane patriarch of
Constantinople. Still, the dividing line between north and south in
Albania was as much religious as economic. The south maintained its
allegiance to Constantinople while the north looked south, to Rome for
spiritual guidance. When the church split in 1054 (to East and West) -
these affiliations remained intact.
It is very little known but the Illyrians actually ruled the Roman
Empire in its last decades. There were a few Illyrian emperors (Gaius
Decius, Claudius Gothicus, Aurelian, Probus, Diocletian, even
Constantine the Great). And most of the officers of the by now fabled
though dilapidated Roman army were Illyrians. In 395, in the
cataclysmic split of the dying empire to East (later, Byzantium) and
West, Albania became finally and firmly a part of the East. The
Illyrians continued to exercise great influence of the amputated East,
some of them becoming influential and historically significant emperors
(Anastasius I, Justin I, Justinian I). As a result, Illyria was the
favourite target of all manner of barbarian tribes: the Visigoths, the
Huns, the Ostrogoths. When the Slavs appeared on the heels of these
invasions, the Illyrians regarded them as just another barbarian tribe.
The interaction between the Illyrians and the Slavs was a love-hate
relationship and has remained so ever since. Some Illyrian groups
assimilated, intermarried and assumed the culture of the invaders. In
300 years, between the 6th and the 8th centuries AD, all the Illyrians
in today's former Yugoslav republics vanished only to re-appear as
Slavs. But the Illyrians of the south (Albania, Western Macedonia)
resisted this process of dilution bitterly and preserved their identity
and culture fiercely. To distinguish themselves from the "assimilated"
- they invented Albania. The name itself is much older. Ptolemy of
Alexandria mentioned it 600 years before the Illyrians began to apply
it to their dwindling polity. And another 300 years were needed - well
into the 11th century AD - before the Illyrians were fully accepted
their reinvention as Albanians - the successors to the Albanoi tribe,
which used to occupy today's central Albania (formerly called Arberi).
Five centuries later, the Albanians themselves renamed their territory
and began to call it Shqiperia. No one really knows why, not even
Albanian scholars, though they like to attribute it (on flimsy
etymological grounds) to Shqipe, the Albanian word for Eagle. Thus,
Albania was transformed to the Land of the Eagle.
It is an irony of history that the Middle (or Dark) Ages were the best
period ever in Albania's history. Powerful cities proliferated,
inhabited by a class of burghers who engaged in trading. Albanian
merchant houses established outposts and branches all over the
Mediterranean, from Venice to Thessalonica. Albanians were the epitome
of education and cultivated the arts. They conversed only in Greek and
Latin, letting the auld language die. The Byzantine Empire was divided
to military provinces (themes). One thing led to another and military
commanders transformed feudal lords administered serfdom to the
population. Feudalism co-existed and then supplanted urbanism and the
big estates became so autonomous that they ignored the Byzantine court
altogether.
But Albania was never peaceful. It was conquered by Bulgarians,
Normans, Italians, Venetians and Serbs in 1347. Many Albanians
immigrated when the Serbs took over, led by Stefan Dusan. They went to
Greece and the Aegean Islands. It was not until 1388 that Albania was
invaded by the Turks. By 1430 it was Turkish. By 1443 it was Albanian.
To this incredible turn of events, the Albanian had Skanderberg to
thank. A military genius (real name Gjergj Kastrioti), he drove the
rising superpower of the Balkans out in a series of humiliating defeats
administered by a coalition of Albanian princes. From his mountainous
hideout in Kruje, he frustrated the Turkish efforts to regain Albania
(they were planning to use it as staging ground for the invasion of
Italy and, thereafter, Western Europe). The Italians (even the Pope,
then the long arm of various shady Italian principates) supported
Skanderberg monetarily and militarily - but he did by far the lion's
share of the work.
But it was a personality-dependent achievement. Like all great leaders,
Skanderberg's fault is that he refused to admit his own mortality and
to nurture the right successor. Following his death, the Turks
recaptured Albania in 1506. But Skanderberg's heroic fight had two
important consequences. One outcome was a considerable weakening of the
Turkish drive towards the heart of Europe and its West. They will never
regain the momentum again and the war was lost. The second momentous
consequence was that his struggle moulded an Albanian NATION where
there was none before.
From the Ottomans to the Americans
The Ottoman occupation was an unmitigated misfortune. Albania -
culturally, a veritable part of Italy in the past - was cut off from it
and from the Renaissance it spawned. The Turks brought with them their
venal type of devastation, not only economic, not only physical, not
only in human lives - but also cultural. A gangrenous paralysis ensued.
The lucky quarter of the population escaped to Italy. The others were
left to fight it out through civil disobedience (refusal to pay taxes,
to serve in the army, to surrender their weapons) and in open
rebellion, time and again, indefatigably and resourcefully, often in
the name of the Christian faith. To put an end to the nuisance, the
Turks islamised the lot (at any rate, two thirds of the lot) during the
16th and 17th centuries. To ensure conversion, the Turks tortured,
killed, raped and taxed the Christians. It worked and people crossed to
the other side in droves. Now there were Catholic Albanians and Muslim
Albanians. It was a replay of the old, 11th century, religious
fragmentation. Albanian political leaders in the 19th century - aware
of the potential of these fractures to denationalise - insisted on
"Albanianism" - a substitute, unifying political "religion". The
rallying cry was: "The religion of Albanians is Albanianism."
Nothing much changed in Albania since the time of feudalism. The Turks
awarded local warlords with land estates to administer (timars). These
warlords - the centres of real power both political and military -
subverted the authority and dominion of the empire. The more the latter
tried to appease them with endowments - the more potent and ambitious
they became. The Bushati family, the eccentric Ali Pasa Tepelene (who
also ruled Northern Greece) and others. In convulsive feats of
reassertion of authority, some sultans deposed of these pashas - but
this did not anything to diminish the autonomy of their estates. In
1831, Turkey abolished the timar system altogether. This bold reform
backfired as the old estates fragmented even further and power devolved
to even lower levels of communal organizations run by beys (in the
north) and bajraktars (everywhere) - bloodthirsty, rigidly patriarchal
and primitive mini rulers. Paradoxically, Albanians who emigrated
(mainly to Turkey itself) rose to prominence. Turkey had 27 (!) grand
viziers (=prime ministers) of Albanian extract.
It was in Kosovo that discontent, unrest and revolt coagulated into the
League of Prizren in 1878. Originally, a narrow local interest northern
group, it fast adopted an expansive agenda, seeking to unify the four
parts of Albania in the four vilayets (Kosovo, Shkoder, Monastir,
Janina) into one political unit. But it wrong to attribute to it the
birth of the delirium of a Great Albania. The League sought an
administrative solution - not a political one. All they wanted was to
create an Albanian zone - but WITHIN the Ottoman Empire. They were more
focussed on benign, less threatening things like culture, art,
literature and education. In short, it was a cultural movement with
administrative aspirations - not the beast of untethered expansionism
it was made out to be by latter day (and rather interested) historians.
It was in Monastir (today's Bitola in Macedonia) that a national,
Latin, alphabet was adopted in 1908. More convenient than Greek or
Arabic - used until then - it triumphed.
History moves in quirkily agonizing twists and turns. It was the
League's involvement with the Albanian language and the strong
opposition by the Turks to its use (the League's activities in this
respect were banned in 1881) that transformed the League from a rather
local affair to a modern national movement along the Italian or German
lines. The Albanian language was indeed suffused by nationalism,
immersed in dreams and aspirations unfulfilled. Its reawakening
signalled the reawakening of Albanianism. When the last great hope,
sealed by Young Turk (broken) promises of autonomy and democracy, was
lost - the Albanians rebelled and forced the Sick Man of Europe to
swallow yet another dose of medicine. In 1912 Turkey granted the
Albanians their wishes only to face the Greek, Serb and Montenegrin
armies, which conquered Albania and divided it among them.
This trauma of division is a recurring trauma in the Albanian psyche.
How ironic that the only people who can empathize with them are the
Macedonians who share the same fear of being quartered. Faced with the
annihilation of Albania so soon after its birth, Albanian leaders met
in Vlore, led by Ismail Kemal, a former high-ranking Ottoman official
of Albanian origin. With nothing much to lose, they decelerated
independence (the Vlore Proclamation) on November 28, 1912.
In December 1912, the Great Powers (the forerunners of NATO) - Britain,
Germany, Russia, Austro-Hungary, Italy and France - met in London to
divide the unexpected spoils. The conference handed an independent
Albanian state to Austro-Hungary and Italy. But the price was a great
diminishment in its geographical scope. Kosovo was given to Serbia,
Cameria to Greece, the most luscious and productive lands and more than
half of all Albanians were left out of the new independent homeland.
Such was the nature of territorial comprises at that time that it
created more problems than it solved. Two news ones were born that day
and hour: a Yugoslav-Albanian flaring animosity and a Greek-Albanian
mutual denial. The unfortunate and tragicomic German who was appointed
to administer Albania (Wilhelm zu Wied) departed soon thereafter with
the outbreak of the First World War.
This first European bloodbath provoked all of Albania's neighbours into
an uncontrolled binge of invasions. Austro-Hungary, France, Italy,
Greece, Montenegro, Serbia - they all marched in with no plan in mind
but to occupy and plunder. The country turned chaotic and it took a
Woodrow Wilson in the Paris Peace Conference to avert an abolition of
the Albanian independent state. It was not the first time Albania
descended into chaos - nor was this to be the last time the Americans
would come to the help of the Albanians. Britain, France and Italy
planned to partition it, Wilson vetoed it and that was the end of the
plan and the beginning of Albania.
In Lushnje, in 1920, the Albanians convened a national congress and
established a government. That year, Albania was admitted to the League
of Nation, sponsored by the very Britain that sought its partition only
the year before. Secure in its sovereignty and international
recognition, Albania inverted its attention. Society was polarized
between land-owning fat cats, the beys and militant archconservative
bajraktars led by Ahmed Bey Zogu from Mat in the north. These
reactionaries were opposed by an uncomfortable coalition of merchants,
intellectuals, progressive politicians and assorted democrats led by an
improbable American-educated bishop of the Orthodox(!) church, one Fan
S. Noli, middle initial and all. The conflict ended 4 years later when,
in 1924 Zogu fled to Yugoslavia. But the entrenched power of the land
gentry was not to be discounted so easily. Noli, now a prime minister,
ruled over the Albanian equivalent of the Republic of Weimar. Radical
land reform, modernization, westernisation. But he was personally
unstable, he won no international recognition (he was considered a
revolutionary leftist) and he had no money to buy his way with. Zogu
came back, this time with a Yugoslav-backed army. He won.
From King Zog to a Brave, New World
Zog commenced his 14 years long reign first as president and then as
king (Zog the first, needless to add). He ruled over a time bomb. The
forces he suppressed with his foreign backed army were rather alive and
well, though in an underground sort of way. In dire need of funds,
after the self-inflicted destruction of his country, Zog resorted to
mortgaging it to foreign powers such as Italy. Italy collected on its
loans in 1939, when it invaded Albania on the way to its Balkan
treasure hunt. King Zog rule of beys and bajraktars aided by a ruthless
police, a Byzantine bureaucracy (a major employer) and Italian money
did stabilize the country, including to the bandit and brigand-ridden
highlands. Many schools were established during his reign. He even
turned a blind eye to western fashions. But this stability was brittle
and fake. Underneath the ornamental surface, the populace was seething.
Peasants aggrieved by the absence of land reform. Democrats opposed to
a dictatorship, however benign. Liberals opposed to the police state.
Nationalists opposed to the undue influence of foreign powers. Albania
imported grain to feed its impoverished population - and exported
people in search of a better life. Periodic revolts interspersed with
labour unrest led directly to the formation of the communist party, the
standard bearer of the educated classes.
In October 1940, Italy invaded Greece from Albania only to be folded
back to whence they came. Nazi Germany had to complete the job as it
swept through Yugoslavia and Greece. In 1941, Albania was rewarded for
its collaboration with the annexation of Kosovo from Yugoslavia and
Cameria from Greece. Having been nearly eliminated by the Allies
(Britain and France) at least twice - and having been rewarded by the
Axis (Austro-Hungary, Germany and Italy) numerous times throughout
their history, the Albanian's loyalty was not in doubt. Though never
the great ideologues - they were althesame instrumental in facilitating
the wartime hegemony of Germany and Italy over the Balkans. The
resistance movement was not uniform, nor was it very effective (though
Albanians like to portray it differently). Finally, in 1944, the
communists took over and their secretary general, Enver Hoxha, became
the leader of a new People's Republic of Albania, later adding the word
"Socialist" to its name (1976).
Nothing seems to have changed in Albania from the 14th century to the
Hoxha days. Burdened by the malaise it contracted from the Ottoman
Empire, it was plagued by poverty, banditry, illiteracy, blood feuds,
disease and the slavery of women and of peasants. At first, the
communist tried to tackle all these ills simultaneously. They drafted a
grand plan of modernization. They vowed to liberate Albania
economically and socially, now that it has been liberated politically
(their reference point was, strangely enough, the bourgeoisie war of
1912). Peasants were handed tiny plots of land taken from the broken
estates of the former beys in an ambitious agrarian reform. Industry,
banks and all foreign property were nationalized. Agriculture was
collectivised in the best Stalinist traditions, though far less swiftly
(it was completed only in 1967). Hoxha subjugated the wild highlands
and strove to eliminate blood feuds and other feudal habits, taking on
the hitherto invincible bajraktars in the process. Women were granted
legal equality with men and were encouraged to participate actively in
their society.
Albania was promiscuous in its foreign affairs, changing partners often
and seemingly whimsically. It paired with Yugoslavia under Tito until
1948, then with the Soviet Union during the days of Stalin and
Khrushchev (until 1961) and then with Maoist China (until 1978). It
expected to receive monetary and military aid - and it did. It received
enormous infusions of credits relative to its economy and it was
virtually invaded by regiments of technical experts who provided
assistance with the various aspects of running a modern state.
Gradually, agriculture was mechanized, industry was modernized and
standards of living increased. It was a golden age and many were happy.
But Hoxha was unhappy. He accused each ally of Albania in its turn of
betraying unadulterated Marxism-Leninism in favour of the wiles of the
capitalistic West. His allies were as disenchanted with his growing
paranoia and geopolitical sado-masochism. Isolated, paranoiac,
obsessive and phobic - Hoxha promulgated an ideology of
self-sufficiency, go-it-alone and the world-is-against-us. Thus, while
Albania made impressive leaps of technology in draining swamps, while
it unified its dialects into a uniform literary language, while it
industrialized and mechanized and reformed and transformed - and it has
- it did so in splendid isolation, often re-inventing the wheel. And it
had a nightmare called Sigurimi.
The Sigurimi was the shadowy, quasi-criminal state security apparatus.
It was a snake raised in the warm bosom of the party. It was
omnipotent. Real or imaginary rivals of the party (really of Hoxha)
were publicly humiliated, dismissed from job, imprisoned in a system of
hideous Gulags, or summarily executed. These bulimic purges were
coupled with growing schizoid tendencies. Travel abroad was prohibited
except on official business, religion (a backward, unprogressive,
disuniting force) was banned.
When Hoxha died in 1985, he was succeeded by a crony, Ramiz Alia, an
Albanian Gorbachev who introduced local versions of Perestroika and
Glasnost even before the Soviet leader did. He legalized foreign
investments and established diplomatic relations with the hitherto
reviled West. But, despite his courage and relative openness, he shared
the fate of other reformers, falling victim to the very forces he
unleashed. In 1989, the workers, the intellectuals and the Albanian
youth were all against the regime. In a spasmodic act of
self-preservation, Alia granted Albanian citizens the right to travel
abroad, limited the reach and powers of the Sigurimi, restored
religious freedom, freedom of political association and adopted free
market reforms. Nothing much was left of Hoxha's heritage. Several
governments later, the Democratic Party, an anti-communist hodgepodge
alliance of interests won the elections (1992). Berisha succeeded Alia.
The communist rule was no more.
It was the beginning of a new Albania. Facing west, it hoped, as it
always has, to modernize, to reform, to belong.
But it was not meant to be.
(Article published October 18-29 - November 1-8
in "Central Europe Review" volume 1, issues 17-20)
Return
The Bad Blood of Kosovo
The old Montenegrins, tall as their mountains, their rocky faces
ravaged by an unforgiving weather define "osveta" thus:
"Osveta, that means... a kind of spiritual fulfilment. You have killed
my son, so I killed yours; I have taken revenge for that, so I now sit
peacefully in my chair."
Milovan Djilas, who helped Tito become Tito and then was imprisoned for
trying to be Djilas, wrote in his book "Land Without Justice"
(Harcourt, Brace 1958):
"Vengeance - this a breath of life one shares from the cradle with
one's fellow clansmen, in both good fortune and bad, vengeance from
eternity. Vengeance was the debt we paid for the love and sacrifice our
forebears and fellow clansmen bore for us. It was the defence of our
honour and good name, and the guarantee of our maidens. I t was our
pride before others; our blood was not water that anyone could spill.
It was, moreover, our pastures and springs - more beautiful than anyone
else's - our family feasts and births. It was the glow in our eyes, the
flame in our cheeks, the pounding in our temples, the word that turned
to stone in our throats on our hearing that our blood had been shed. It
was the sacred task transmitted in the hour of death to those who had
just been conceived in our blood. It was centuries of manly pride and
heroism, survival, a mother's milk and a sister's vow, bereaved parents
and children in black, joy and songs turned into silence and wailing.
It was all, all."
And this is what Margaret Durham had to say in her celebrated
ethnography of Albania, a long time ago ("Some Tribal Origins of Laws
and Customs of the Balkans" - Allan and Unwin, 1928):
"A certain family had long been notorious for evil-doing - robbing,
shooting, and being a pest to the tribe. A gathering of all the heads
condemned all the males of the family to death. Men were appointed to
lay in wait for them on a certain day and pick them off; and on that
day the whole seventeen of them were shot. One was but five and another
but twelve years old. I protested against thus killing children who
must be innocent and was told: 'It was bad blood and must not be
further propagated.' Such was the belief in heredity that it was
proposed to kill an unfortunate woman who was pregnant, lest she should
bear a male and so renew the evil."
In the second century BC, Kosovo was populated by people with
picturesque names: the Iliyrians, Thracians, the Celts. The whole area
was under Roman rule and was subjected to the industriousness and
meticulousness of Empire. Roads were paved, cities built, populations
moved and commerce flourished. This lasted two hundreds years. Slav
tribes descended from the Carpathian Mountains and ended it in orgies
of blood and fire. Until this very day, serious Greek politicians
invoke this primordial invasion in their effort to convince an
incredulous world that the (current) Macedonians are not the (True)
Macedonians. "They are the off spring of invading Slavs" - they claim,
passionately, as is the habit in the Balkans. It took another two
centuries and a Byzantine brief occupation to force the reluctant Slavs
to settle along the Sava River and to form the poor semblance of a
civilization in the making. Roving "saints" of fervent disposition
taught them a new alphabet. Cyril and Methodius were succeeded by
disciples all over Central and Eastern Europe - from the period of
Kliment Ohridski in today's territories of Macedonia and Bulgaria to
Amos Comenius, the 17th century educator, considered in the Balkans to
be their spiritual descendant in the Czech Lands.
This ability to cast their myths in paper in the vernacular, to hand
the national memory down the generations, the newfound Christian
religion - all coagulated into an emergently distinct culture. Come the
12th century, Kosovo was entirely Slav.
Or, to be more precise: entirely Serb. The Slavs fractured into three
groups. The Croats and Slovenes, baptized by Rome, became ardent Roman
Catholics. The Serbs - introduced to the faith by Byzantium - remained
Eastern Orthodox. This division was to last a thous
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