- There has been much hand-wringing over the widespread
looting in Iraq following the Anglo-American invasion. Evidence that the
looting was permitted, and perhaps even encouraged, by coalition troops
has not quelled the party line that this is a transitional stage and that
reconstruction is proceeding apace. But could the creation of chaos be
a deliberate and even lasting policy? Recent events in Serbia, the last
country to have democracy imposed on it by force, indicate that the lawlessness
and anarchy that now terrorize the civilian population of Iraq are not
a regrettable transitory stage in the onward march towards the New World
Order. They are instead the very essence of that order.
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- It was Pierre Vergniaud, a Girondin, who correctly
predicted that the French Revolution, like Saturn, would devour its own
children. That certainly happened on the morning of March 12, 2003 in Belgrade,
when an assassin's bullet dispatched the Serbian prime minister in a few
swift seconds.
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- Few men incarnated the revolutionary force of
the New World Order better than Zoran Djindjic-Marxist philosopher, bootlegger,
and spook. Djindjic left Yugoslavia in the early 1970s to study at the
feet of Jürgen Habermas, the extreme left-wing ideologue who, like
his pupil, was later to become a prophet of globalism and the end of the
nation-state. In 1984, Djindjic wrote that he had gone to study in Germany
because Yugoslav Marxism had been fatally weakened by Marshall Tito's policy
of openness to the West. But his esoteric academic activities-which were
in any case abandoned in the 1990s when he became an extreme Serb nationalist
and, later, an extreme supporter of Euro-Atlantic integration and world-wide
free trade-were in part a front for his business activities. He started
off with a covert export-import business, involving the sale of textiles
produced in his numerous sweatshops, and went on to become a major cigarette
smuggler during the 1990s, something finally revealed by sections of the
Serbian press, now closed down, in 2001.
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- If the various and contradictory ideologies Djindjic
adopted all had one thing in common-the destruction of the existing order
in the name of total revolution-it was his status as a capo dei capi, one
of the richest men in a region thick with wealthy and ruthless criminals,
which made him attractive to the West. Here was a man who cared only for
his own personal gain and not for his country. Moreover, his comings and
goings between Germany and Yugoslavia had enabled him to work, it is said,
for both the German and Yugoslav intelligence services. So in October 2000,
Djindjic helped the Americans to organize the coup d'état that overthrew
Slobodan Milosevic. According to two of his fans who wrote a history of
that day, Oct. 5, 2000, Djindjic had carefully studied both Trotsky and
Curzio Malaparte's Techniques of a Coup d'état-based on Mussolini's
March on Rome-in preparation for his own march on Belgrade. He trousered
some $100 million of U.S. taxpayers' money for the purpose and did not
hesitate to employ in this task other members of the criminal gangs of
which he was a product.
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- These gangsters who helped him, as he was later
to brag, included one Milorad Lukovic, alias Legija, the man who was accused
of killing him in March. Legija had commanded a murderous paramilitary
unit in Bosnia, which was later integrated into the Yugoslav police under
the terms of the Dayton Accords in 1995. It was Legija's agreement to support
Djindjic that enabled the Oct. 5 coup to be successful. In April 2001,
Legija's men stormed Slobodan Milosevic's residence and carted him off
to the central prison in Belgrade, whence he was arrested and taken to
The Hague. Throughout 2001 and 2002, moreover, Legija's unit, according
to the admission of the Serbian deputy prime minister, assisted the regular
Yugoslav police in their anti-terrorist operations against Albanian insurgents
in southern Serbia. Most Serbs, therefore, regarded it as a sick joke when
Western governments claimed that Djindjic had been assassinated by Legija's
men because he was fighting organized crime. Although spivvery had certainly
existed under Milosevic, an inevitable consequence of sanctions and war,
it had only really let rip under Djindjic.
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- Serbian society is now so totally criminalized,
indeed, that Serbs naturally assume that the West itself was somehow implicated
in Djindjic's murder. They speculate that Djindjic may have been finally
getting too big for his boots; that he was starting to get awkward over
the West's failure to pay promised aid; and that several big contracts
were about to go to German interests rather than American ones. They also
point out that Djindjic was one of the few Eastern European leaders who
refused to sign a letter of support for the Anglo-American position on
Iraq in March. If such conspiracy theories seem outlandish, it should be
remembered that the West had already brought Mafia regimes to power in
neighboring Albania, Kosovo, and Montenegro, while it has also strenuously
and successfully supported the integration into the Macedonian government
of Albanian terrorists, drug-runners, and people-traffickers.
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- It was therefore natural that Djindjic and his
American minders should have jointly conceived a plan to impose social
chaos in Yugoslavia before and after the overthrow of Milosevic. In order
to promote genuine revolution, or what Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise
Institute extols as "creative destruction," the rebels did everything
to prevent the Yugoslav presidential elections in 2000 from going to a
necessary second round. They thus ensured that there would be a period
of total social collapse, just as there had been in Kosovo when the Serbs
were forced to withdraw in June 1999, just as there was to be this year
in Iraq. This created fertile ground for grabbing the key points of political
control of the state, as well as for stealing its riches. The seizure of
factories and enterprises all over Yugoslavia by men with guns in the aftermath
of the Oct. 5 coup was merely repeated when mass looting spread across
Iraq in April.
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- Subsequent events in Serbia have only underlined
this alliance between Western-sponsored New-World-Order governments and
organized crime. Following the assassination of Djindjic, the Serbian government
promptly declared a state of emergency, something that did not happen after
the assassinations of Jack Kennedy, Olaf Palme, or Rajiv Gandhi. Using
powers the West had attacked as dictatorial when Milosevic made provision
for them in 1992, but that he never used, some 8,000 people were taken
in for questioning, 2,000 of whom were detained by police with no access
to lawyers, no access to their familes, and without even being charged.
In Belgrade, I interviewed two opposition politicians who had been detained
for 30 days on the basis that their liberty "could pose a threat to
the security of other citizens, and to the Republic." This is little
but George W. Bush's policy of pre-emptive war applied to domestic policing.
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- As former President Vojislav Kostunica also put
it to me when I met him in Belgrade, the government clearly treated Djindjic's
assassination as Stalin had treated the murder of Serge Kirov on Dec. 1,
1934-as a pretext for eliminating its political opponents. After declaring
that the so-called "patriotic forces" had conspired to kill Djindjic,
the Serbian Interior Minister proudly told a congress of European Youth
leaders on April 18, "The imposition of the state of emergency gave
the Serbian government the opportunity to rid itself of all remnants of
the Milosevic regime." Even though the Socialist Party of Serbia has
never been declared illegal, this use of state organs to suppress political
opposition was enthusiastically welcomed by Western governments. Colin
Powell made a special trip to Belgrade last month to say how much the U.S.
supported the mass arrests, and Serbia-Montenegro (as Yugoslavia is now
officially known) was admitted to the Council of Europe, the human rights
body, even as thousands were being detained.
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- Politicians from Milosevic's Socialists and Vojislav
Kostunica's Democratic Party of Serbia figured prominently among the arrestees,
as did any journalists who "incited the prime minister's assassination"
by criticizing him before it happened. Television stations, newspapers,
and magazines were closed down, and the remaining media were obliged to
publish only official government press statements. Their flowery language
about the "heroic" efforts of the police prompted those Serbs
old enough to remember Tito to joke that the state journalists from that
period must have been brought out of retirement to write them.
-
- As in the War on Terror, the principal culprits
originally fingered for the crime have got away. Legija remains at large-like
Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein-and although many of his Zemun gang
have indeed been caught, the head of the rival Surcin gang was taken in
for questioning and then politely released without charge. Given that the
background of the present prime minister of Serbia is in running gambling
joints in the southern Serbian town of Nis and that many believe one of
the deputy prime ministers is a heroin addict, the suspicion of most Serbs
is that the post-Djindjic government is using the instruments of the state
to suppress one gang for the benefit of another. With foreign investment
and foreign aid drying up, there is simply less money around for such crooks
to steal: the battles between them are therefore becoming all the more
bitter. Amidst all this chaos, the only thing that continued unperturbed
was the privatization process, a euphemism for the sale of national assets
to foreigners. At the height of the purges, U.S. Steel bought a gigantic
factory in Serbia, with 10,000 employees, for the paltry sum of $23 million,
a deal made all the sweeter because the factory's $1.7 billion debt is
being assumed by the Serbian taxpayers.
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- Much has been made in the last decade of the
sudden conversion of so-called communists to the virtues of capitalism.
But the equal and opposite trend has gone largely unnoticed-the adoption
by Western policy-makers of the key tenets of the discredited Communist
creed. Foremost among these is the myth of revolution. From Bucharest via
Belgrade to Baghdad, highly organized or totally artificial events are
presented as the spontaneous actions of "the people," like the
silly charade organized outside the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad last month.
In keeping with its new revolutionary ideology, the West encourages chaos
and criminality, in order to tear down the old order and in order to keep
the population too preoccupied with daily cares to organize any effective
political resistance. Social chaos forces the population of an occupied
country, like Iraq, to make a Hobbesian pact with its invaders and to look
to the coalition soldiers for protection, thus lending them an apparent
legitimacy they would otherwise lack.
-
- Both Iraq and Serbia were subject, for a decade, to a
stringent regime of sanctions. This gave rise, in both cases, to the same
dramatic increase in criminality and to the same sense that the whole country
is up for sale. Now, the U.S. State Department is backing Ahmad Chalabi
in Iraq, a man sentenced to 20 years in prison for bank fraud in Jordan,
while our allies in Iraqi Kurdistan are essentially gangs of people-smugglers.
If the electricity in Kosovo has not been repaired after four years of
occupation, there is little prospect of the lights soon coming back on
in Baghdad; and with the West continuing strenuously to support criminal
regimes across the Balkans, a peninsula it also occupies militarily, the
message for the Iraqis is clear.
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- John Laughland is a London-based writer and lecturer
and a trustee of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group.
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