Embracing neighbours, eroding rights

New York, August 2001. It is a few weeks before the 11 September atrocities but I don’t know that yet. I am in a musty old Manhattan cinema, watching a film about the murder of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first prime minister after independence. My attention is drifting when a stony-faced US diplomat appears onscreen. America does not meddle in the internal affairs of other countries, the character says. The sparse audience erupts in a scornful laughter, a sound that will stay with me for years afterwards.

I was reminded of that laughter when I saw the reactions to the street protests that brought down Tunisian tyrant Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. “We can’t take sides,” Hillary Clinton stated. Her pal Cathy Ashton was more willing to salute the demonstrators’ courage. “The EU will stand side by side with Tunisians as they pursue their peaceful and democratic aspirations,” the Union’s foreign policy chief said.

Was this a glorious moment when the Brussels elite was championing the oppressed against their oppressor? No, it was a moment of sordid opportunism.

Far from despising Ben Ali, the West has courted him assiduously for much of his 23-year-rule. Under his yoke, Tunisia was something of a poster child for market fundamentalism. In 1985 – two years before he seized the presidency in a coup – the country embarked on a “structural adjustment programme” drawn up by the International Monetary Fund. Far-reaching privatisation ensued; the public sector was slashed so drastically that the rate of unemployment among university graduates became one of the world’s highest. Unconcerned about the limited prospects for young Tunisians, France, its former colonial overlord, heaped praise on Ben Ali. Jacques Chirac used to wax lyrical about the “Tunisian economic miracle”.

One part of the public sector was spared the knife wielded over the rest. Under Ben Ali, security would gobble up such a large proportion of expenditure that the country had 150,000 police officers for less than 10 million inhabitants. So it is little wonder that the US and its lackeys viewed Ben Ali as a valuable ally in the “war on terror”. Some of our governments thought nothing about sending Tunisians arrested on their soil home, despite the strong likelihood they would be tortured. The Italian authorities forced Medhi Ben Mohamed Khalaifia, a man previously convicted on terrorism-related charges, back to Tunisia in 2009. Held incommunicado for 12 days, Khalaifia has complained that he was beaten and threatened with rape by his interrogators.

In 2002, Romano Prodi, then the European Commission’s president, presented a plan to have a “ring of friends” around the EU. By that time Ben Ali’s status as one of the EU’s best mates had already been assured. Tunisia was the first of the EU’s Mediterranean neighbours to sign a fancy new type of “association agreement” with the Union in 1995. Entering into force three years later, the novelty in this accord was that it wasn’t only supposed to be about narrow economic issues but contained a legally-binding clause designed to protect fundamental rights.

Although assessments by the Commission’s own staff noted major deficiencies in Tunisia’s human rights record, the EU has contributed directly to propping up Ben Ali’s regime. Tunisia received €330 million from the EU’s budget between 2007 and 2010; it has also been allocated loans worth €3.6 billion from the European Investment Bank since 1978. Stefan Füle, the EU commissioner in charge of the European Neighbourhood Policy, may have signalled his support for the Tunisian protesters last week. One month earlier, Füle spoke about how his officials were in discussions with Ben Ali’s regime on how its relations with the EU could be elevated to an “advanced status”. That would involve bringing Tunisia into the EU’s single market for goods and services.

The caressing of Ben Ali is part of a wider pattern of letting political expediency triumph over the rights and needs of ordinary people in North Africa and the Middle East. In 2008 Morocco was granted the “advanced status” that Ben Ali coveted, despite how it occupies Western Sahara, plundering the territory’s natural resources in defiance of international law. The strengthening of EU relations with Libya, meanwhile, are being driven primarily by a xenophobic desire to keep Africans out of Europe. Tripoli has not accepted the 1951 Refugee Convention, which lays down basic rules on how asylum-seekers should be protected throughout the globe, yet this hasn’t stopped the Union from cooperating with it to push back – often brutally – those impoverished Africans who try to enter Europe via Libya.

Both Füle and Ashton are also involved in talks with Israel about giving practical effect to an agreement reached in late 2008 on “upgrading” its ties to the EU. Work on that dossier was slowed down because of the subsequent attack on Gaza but Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s openly racist foreign minister, is now trying to revive the momentum. When Ashton met him a few weeks ago, she spoke of how Israel-EU links are “strong and solid” and expressed hope that they will become stronger in the coming months. Ashton almost certainly knows that 1.4 million Palestinians do not have enough food to lead healthy lives because of the noose Israel has placed around the necks of an entire people. There are no reasons to believe that the noose will be loosened once the EU gets even closer to Israel; if anything, it could be tightened.

·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 23-29 January 2011

IMF: master of Europe

Did you weep with joy on New Year’s Day 2002? For Romano Prodi, the experience of watching shiny euro coins spring from cash registers for the first time was akin to a federalist wet dream. “The euro is our money, my money, your money,” Prodi, then president of the European Commission, gushed. “And a little piece of Europe in your hands.”

Prodi was one of several EU leaders to hail the introduction of a single currency as proof that wounds opened by the Second World War had finally been heeled. What hogwash. Far from being a triumph for peace, the euro was the realisation of a plan hatched by a corporate clique. Just five companies – Fiat, Total, Solvay, Philips and Rhône Poulenc – laid the euro’s foundations when they formed the Association for the Monetary Union of Europe in 1987. According to their rationale, the patchwork of different currencies used in Europe at the time hampered it from competing with Japan or the US.

Next week the flaws in that blinkered logic will be exposed when the EU’s presidents and prime ministers meet in Brussels. Apparently in a bid to stop the euro-zone from disintegrating, the summit is expected to endorse a “financial stability mechanism” for economies in difficulty. Doubtlessly, there will be some effort made to depict the scheme as a gesture of solidarity; yet the small-print reveals that many of the levers of economic power will be held by an institution based in Washington.

In order to qualify for loans from the mechanism, a country would have to go through rigorous checks from the International Monetary Fund. The IMF might typically be headed by a European nominee but is nonetheless an agent of US imperialism. Piecemeal reforms to the fund in recent times have not weakened America’s grip over it. Commanding 16.5% of its voting shares, the US retains a veto over all key decisions. Rather than the euro enabling Europe to compete with America, a US proxy is now to be given greater power to meddle in our economies.

For a brief period in 2008, it was fashionable for commentators to predict the end of neo-liberalism – that poisonous ideology under which the market was treated as infallible. The savage cutbacks forced on Greece and Ireland this year by the IMF – with the backing of the EU’s top institutions - illustrate how premature those predictions were.

Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine offers an indispensable guide to understanding what is really happening. She traces how the IMF underwent a process of “colonisation” by acolytes of Milton Friedman, the right-wing economist who acted as a mentor to such destructive politicians as Donald Rumsfeld and the Chilean tyrant Augusto Pinochet. That process came to fruition in 1989 when the “Washington Consensus” was unveiled, committing the IMF and its sister body the World Bank to privatising every activity under the sun, as well as to scaling back public spending everywhere.

I have just returned from a speaking tour of Ireland, where I was astonished with the deference with which Ajai Chopra, head of an IMF “mission” to the country, was treated by the national broadcaster RTE. Chopra’s surface geniality and his insistence that he is merely a humble civil servant should not be allowed conceal how he is a Friedmanite fundamentalist. During the 1990s he was tasked with “rescuing” the South Korean economy. The “humble” servant treated democracy with disdain by telling all four candidates in a presidential election that Korea would receive no foreign assistance unless they signed up to an austerity programme. The resulting cuts he demanded helped Korea’s unemployment rate to triple between 1996 and 1999.

Chopra has displayed similar contempt towards Irish sovereignty. Although Brian Cowen, the Taoiseach (Irish prime minister), stated that the IMF had no interest in micro-managing economies, that is precisely what it’s doing. After an IMF paper from November advocated that the country’s minimum wage should be slashed, the Dublin government obediently took measures to steal from the poor. You can be sure that Chopra and his team would never agree to work for €7.65 per hour (down from €8.65 per hour) but that is the new minimum wage that has been set for Ireland.

Things are even worse in Romania, where the IMF has told the Bucharest authorities not to increase wage levels that are as paltry as €150 per month. And they are worse again beyond this continent, where the cost of the IMF’s inflexibility can be measured in human lives. As its contribution to a United Nations summit convened to address global poverty in September, the IMF argued that low-income countries in Africa and Asia should not increase government spending unless their revenue also rises. This hawkish approach to deficit management is imperilling the realisation of the UN’s millennium development goals for reducing the most extreme forms of poverty – including infant and maternal mortality – by 2015, a study by Oxfam has found.

Five years ago, the Malian president Amadou Toumani Touré poured brilliant scorn on the IMF for conditioning assistance to the country on privatisation of its cotton industry. “People who have never seen cotton come to give us lessons on cotton,” he thundered. “This is not a partnership. This is a master relating to his student.”

The IMF’s status as master of Africa has long been assured. We know now that it is master of Europe too.

·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 12-18 December 2010