Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"

Izetbegovic, the late nominal president of the nominal Bosnian
state, the darling of the gullible western media, denied that he and
his cronies and his cronies' cronies stole 40% of all civilian aid
targeted at Bosnia - a minor matter of 1 billion US dollars and
change, in less than 4 years. The tribes of the Balkans stop
bleeding each other to death only when they gang up to bleed
another. In this, there are no races and no traces - everyone is
equal under the sign of the dollar. Serbs, Bosnians and Croats
divided the loot with the loftiest of egalitarian instincts. Honour
among thieves transformed into honour among victims and their
murderers. Mammon is the only real authority in this god forsaken,
writhing rump of a country.

And not only there.

In Russia, billions (3 to 5) were transferred to secret off shore
bank accounts to be "portfolio managed" by mysterious fly-by-night
entities. Many paid with their jobs when the trail led to the
incestuous Yeltsin clan and their byzantine court.

Convoys snake across the mountainous Kosovo, bringing smuggled goods
at exorbitant prices to the inhabitants of this parched territory -
all under the avuncular gaze of multinational peacekeepers.

In Romania, Hungary and Greece, UN forces have been known to take
bribes to allow goods into besieged Serbia. Oil, weapons and
strategic materials, all slid across this greasy channel of the
international brotherhood of cash.

A lot of the aid, ostensibly intended to ameliorate the state of
refugedom imposed upon the unsuspecting, harried population of
Kosovo - resurfaced in markets, white and black, across the region.
Food, blankets, tents, electrical equipment, even toys - were on
offer in bazaars from Skopje to Podgorica and from Sofia to
Thessaloniki, replete with the stamps of the unwitting donors. Aid
workers scurried back and forth in expensive utility vehicles,
buzzing mobile phones in hand and latest model, officially
purchased, infrared laptops humming in the air conditioned coolness
of their five star hotel rooms (or fancy apartments). In their back
pockets they safeguarded their first class tickets (the food is
better and the stewardesses ...). The scavengers of every carnage,
they descended upon this tortured land in redundant hordes, feeding
off the misery, the autoimmune deficiency of the syndrome of
humanism.

Ask yourselves: how could one of every 3 dollars - 50% of GNP - be
stolen in a country the size of a tiny American state - without the
knowledge and collaboration of the international organizations which
ostensibly manage this bedlam? Why did the IMF renew the credit
lines to a Russia which cheated bold-facely regarding its foreign
exchange reserves? How was Serbia awash and flush with oil and other
goods prohibited under the terms of the never-ending series of
embargoes imposed upon it?

The answer is that potent cocktail of fear and graft. First came
fear - that Russia will collapse, that the Balkans will spill over,
that Bosnia will disintegrate. Nuclear nightmares intermingled with
Armenian and Jewish flashbacks of genocide. The west shut its eyes
tight and threw money at the bad spirits of irredentism and re-
emergent communism. The long arm of the USA, the "international"
financial institutions, collaborated in constructing the habit
forming dole house that Eastern and Southern Europe has become. This
conflict-reticence, these approach-avoidance cycles led to an
inevitable collusion between the ruling mob families that pass for
regimes in these parts of the planet - and the unilateral
institutions that pass for multilateral ones in the rest of it. An
elaborate system of winks and nods, the sign language of
institutional rot and decaying governance, took over. Greasy palms
clapped one another with the eerie silence of conspiracy. The world
looked away as both - international financial institutions and
corrupt regimes - robbed their constituencies blind. This was
perceived to be the inevitable moral cost of stability. Survival of
the majority entailed the filthy enrichment of the minority. And the
west acquiesced.

But this grand design backfired. Like insidious bacteria, corruption
breeds violence and hops from host to host. It does not
discriminate, this plague of black conscience, between east and
west. As it infected the indigenous, it also effected their
guardians. They were all engulfed by raging greed, by a degradation
of the inhibitions and by the intoxicating promiscuity of
lawlessness. Inebriated by their newly found powers, little ceasars -
natives and financial colonialists - claimed their little plots of
crime and avarice, a not so secret order of disintegration of the
social fabric. A ghoulish landscape, shrouded in the opaque mist of
the nomenclature, the camaraderie of the omnipotent.

And corruption bred violence. The Chicago model imported lock, stock
and the barrel of the gun. Former cronies disappeared mysteriously,
bloated corpses in stale hotel rooms - being the only "contracts"
honoured. Territories were carved up in constant, unrelenting
warfare. One billion dollars are worth a lot of blood and it was
spilled with glee, with the enthusiasm of the inevitable, with the
elation of gambling all on a single spin of the Russian roulette.

It is this very violence that the west tried to drown with its
credits. But unbeknownst to it, this very violence thrived on these
pecuniary fertilizers. A plant of horrors, it devoured its soil and
its cultivators alike. And 120,000 people paid with their lives for
this wrong gamble. Counting its losses, the west is poised to spin
the wheel again. More money is amassed, the dies are cast and more
people cast to die.


Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant
Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West
Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician,
Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a
United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and
the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in
The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government
of Macedonia.

Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com