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In
this electrifying interview, Prof. Chossudovsky challenges the
movement which has converged on Washington to look more deeply
at the institutions destroying nations in the Third World and
the former Socialist bloc. In doing so, Chossudovsky opens a much-needed
discussion.
Michel
Chossudovsky: When
an IMF mission goes into a country and requires the destruction
of social and economic institutions as a condition for lending
money – this is very similar to the physical destruction
caused by NATO bombing. The IMF will order the closing down of
hospitals, schools and factories. That's of course more cost effective
than bombing those hospitals, schools and factories, as they did
in Yugoslavia, but the ultimate result is very similar: the destruction
of the country.
The IMF has what is called the MAI – the Multilateral Agreement
on Investment. It's the ultimate investment treaty. Signing leads
to the economic destruction of the targeted country. Well, really,
war is simply the MAI of last resort.
Jared
Israel: What are your thoughts on the demands of the
folks protesting now in Washington?
Chossudovsky:
Well, lots of people have converged on Washington to protest
the Bretton Woods system, the IMF and the World Bank. The question
is: what are we fighting for? I suspect the dominant position
among the NGOs [Non-Governmental Organizations] is still that
we need to reform these institutions, give them a human face,
make them work for the poor and so forth. I think this approach,
which developed from the "50 Years Is Enough" campaign
against the Bretton Woods institutions is a mistake. And increasingly
people are challenging it, questioning the legitimacy of these
Washington institutions.
But still there's a lot of confusion. Some think the IMF and World
Bank are playing contradictory roles, which is not so. And also
there's a tendency to see these institutions in isolation. In
fact they are simply two tools used by the Western elite to destroy
nations, to turn them into territories.
JI:
You think some people are fooled by the World Bank?
Chossudovsky:
They believe the World Bank has adopted a humane approach,
that it's involved in poverty alleviation whereas the IMF creates
poverty. Or they even think there's a conflict between the two.
That's nonsense. The World Bank is doing essentially the same
job as the IMF; it merely has different responsibilities in the
Third World. In a way, it is far more dangerous precisely because
[of the fact that] its supposed mandate to alleviate poverty disarms
critics. The simple fact is: Wall Street is behind both these
institutions. They are run by bankers not sociologists.
Free
Trade, brother of War
Chossudovsky:
More important: a lot of people don't see the link to NATO.
Very few of the organizations criticizing the Bretton Woods institutions
opposed the attack on Yugoslavia. They didn't talk about it in
Seattle and they aren't doing it in Washington now. They campaign
against free trade, against the IMF, in favor of the Jubilee campaign
to cancel third world debt, but not against war. But free trade
and war go hand in hand. It was true with the British in the 19th
century when they forced the Chinese to "freely"
purchase opium and it is true today.
And there's a good deal of coordination between the IMF and NATO.
You saw it in Kosovo. The IMF and the World Bank had set up a
postwar economic plan including free market reforms well before
the onset of bombing.1 They
work together. If a country refuses IMF intervention, NATO steps
in, or NATO and various covert agencies, and they create the proper
conditions for IMF programs to be imposed.
JI:
Very sharp point.
Chossudovsky:
The countries that accept the IMF, like Bulgaria and Romania,
they may not get bombed but they are destroyed with the pen. In
Bulgaria the IMF implemented the most drastic reforms, IMF medicine,
which decimated social conditions – pensions slashed, factories
closed, dumping of cheap finished goods, elimination of free medical
care and transportation services and so on.
And it's not just NATO. We see that in Central Asia and the Caucasus.
Hand in hand with the imposition of IMF and World Bank reforms
and privatization program we have not only NATO but also CIA covert
intelligence operations – the institutions of war and economic
management interface with one another at a global level.
So right now various countries are being softened up with regional
conflicts that are financed overtly and covertly by the Western
elite. The KLA is just one example of an externally financed insurgency.
You see these manipulated conflicts especially wherever there
are strategic pipelines, and they are linked to the drug trade
and the CIA, covertly, then openly linked to NATO and official
US foreign policy, and finally to the IMF, the World Bank and
regional banks and private investors. Links in a chain.
Let's categorize these global institutions: you've got the United
Nations system and peace keeping; they play a role and they are
interfacing with NATO as well. Then you've got the IMF and the
World Bank, and the regional development banks like the ADB, the
Asian Development Bank, and so on. In Europe it's the European
Bank for Reconstruction and Development. These are the main arms.
Sometimes war creates the conditions, and then the economic institutions
come in and pick up the pieces. Or conversely the IMF itself does
the destabilizing, as they did in Indonesia. They insisted on
cutting off transfer payments to the various states in the federation.
Now that fractures a country like Indonesia which has 2,000 islands
with a system of local governments. It is the geography of the
bloody place. So they leave these islands to their own devices.
Do you see what that accomplishes?
JI:
In other words, they insisted on cutting money that was supposed
to subsidize local government?
Chossudovsky:
Yes, for example for education and so on. By doing this –
and incidentally they did it in Brazil as well – they destabilize
the country because in order to have a country there must be fiscal
coherence, a system of fiscal transfers. So in a place like Indonesia,
each of these islands becomes a small state. And of course now
the idea of going it alone becomes far more attractive to the
many different ethnic groups. Of course they [that is, the planners]
are fully aware of this – they have made it happen time and
again. It took place in Yugoslavia; it took place in Brazil; it
took place in the former Soviet Union where the regions are left
to their own devices because Moscow doesn't transfer any money.
Potentially it could happen in the United States as well. It is
guaranteed to produce a situation of conflict, internal strife.
JI:
Mutually unproductive conflict…
Chossudovsky:
Yes because people are impoverished to such an extent that they
start fighting.
JI:
On every basis, especially ethnic.
Chossudovsky:
Incidentally in Somalia there weren't any ethnic groups,
but it worked there too. You don't need a multi-ethnic society
to have divisions, to have Balkanization.
JI:
And you're saying this is part and parcel of a plan for Empire?
Chossudovsky:I
am saying this is recolonization. Countries are transformed into
territories, colonies essentially.
JI:
What distinguishes the two?
Countries vs. territories
Chossudovsky:A
country has a government. It has institutions. It has a budget.
It has economic borders. It has customs. A territory has only
a nominal government, controlled by the IMF. No schools and hospitals,
as those have been closed down on orders of the World Bank. No
borders because the WTO has ordered free trade. No industry or
agriculture because these have been destabilized as the result
of interest rates of 60% per anum and that is also the IMF program.
JI:
60% per year?
Chossudovsky:In
Brazil it's much higher. I'm looking at Botswana now. The interest
rate is horrendously high.
Israel:
And this is imposed by the IMF?
Chossudovsky:They
put a ceiling on credit. Do you see? So people can't get bank
loans; it drives interest sky high and that kills the economy.
Then they open it up to free trade. So the local capitalist enterprises
have to borrow at 60% from the local banks and then they have
to compete with commodities from the United States or Europe where
interest rates are 6 or 7%. These reforms are essentially aimed
at destroying local capitalism.
JI:
So how do we fight this?
Chossudovsky:Not
with a single-issue movement. We can't focus solely on the Bretton
Woods institutions, or the WTO, or environmental issues or genetic
engineering; we have to look at the totality of relations. When
we look at the totality we see the link to the use of force.
Beneath this economic system lie the undercover features of the
capitalist order: the military-industrial complex, the intelligence
apparatus and the links to organized crime including the use of
narcotics to finance conflicts aimed at opening nations to Western
control.
We have gone from gunboat diplomacy to missile diplomacy. In fact
it is not missile diplomacy. It is sheer bombing.
JI:
You said that part of the military intelligence apparatus
is gangsters. I know that you have been writing material about
how drugs is actually an economically powerful force.
Chossudovsky:
Well it is more complicated than that. Because in fact the
gangsters are the instruments of big capital. They are not –
they don't overshadow the system in any way. The gangsters are
people who can be easily used precisely because they are not responsible
to anybody. So it is much more convenient.
Let's say you install Hacim Thaci [leader of the Kosovo Liberation
Army] in the seat of government in Kosovo. It's much more convenient
to have a gangster like this running a country than to have an
elected prime minister that is responsible to citizens.
The best thing is to have an elected gangster, somebody like Boris
Yeltsin, that's the best – get an elected gangster. We have
elected gangsters in the US as well.
Why? Because elected gangsters are much easier to control than
elected non-gangsters. But we must understand these gangsters
are pretty obviously subordinate – when we say it is the
criminalization of the colony, it is not true. It's the other
way around. You are never going to have a situation where these
gangsters will be given any power. The big ones perhaps... So
there is a certain interpenetration of legal and illicit trade.
But in effect illicit trade is always subordinate to large scale
financial and business undertakings.
An important aspect of this is that the IMF creates the conditions
for the growth of illicit trade and for the laundering of dirty
money, all over the world. That is very clear because when legal
economies collapse under the brunt of IMF reforms what are you
left with? It's the gray economy; it's the criminal economy.
JI:
And that encourages the development of forces that can be
used to replace potentially responsible legal forces.
Chossudovsky:Yes
and that type of collapse in legal economic systems creates also
the conditions for developing insurgencies, destabilizing elected
governments, closing down of institutions and transforming countries
into territories which are then run as colonies.
1
"In
Opening
Kosovo to foreign capital."
Michel
Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics, University of Ottawa, specializes
in studying the effects of Western economic policy on the world.
He is author of "The Globalization of Poverty, Impacts of IMF
and World Bank Reforms", TWN, Penang and Zed Books, London, 1997.
For information on ordering a copy, write to emperors1000@aol.com.
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