|
John
Laughland reveals that the colonial governors of the New World
Order treat their subject peoples with contempt.
"If
I may say so" – the spectacles were settled gently but threateningly
on the nose as the Morningside accent ground into its most sadistic
high gear – "I have been around long enough to know a criminal
when I see one. I have made it quite clear that the High Representative
will not talk to criminals." Mr. Colin Munro, a deputy for
the UN High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, was justifying
the recent decision by his office to sack two leaders of the Bosnian
Croats from their elected posts, Ante Jelavic and Marko Tokic,
and subsequently to send Sfor troops in to raid a bank used by
their political party. His remarks were in response to my simple
question, "What convictions have you obtained which enable
you to call these people criminals?" A shorter answer would
have been, "None."
Mr.
Munro works for Wolfgang Petritsch, the UN governor of Bosnia
and Herzegovina. On 5th April, Mr. Petritsch signed
a "Decision" to appoint a provisional administrator
for the Hercegovacka Banka, whose head office is in Mostar and
which has some 30 branches around Herzegovina. In the early hours
of the following morning, before daybreak, Sfor-Nato troops and
police from the Muslim-Croat federation, wearing black hoods,
arrived in tanks and brandishing guns. They smashed their way
through a fence at the back of the bank, kicked down glass doors,
trashed other offices in the same building, and stamped on two
photographs of the Pope. Four people – two policemen and two civilians
– were wounded in the ensuing scuffles.
Two
weeks later, they returned, again in tanks and helicopters and
with guns, to dynamite open the safe and make off with over DM
1.5 million. Similar military operations were conducted against
branches of the bank all over Herzegovina, including at the pilgrimage
town of Medjugorje, where Nato soldiers were pelted with eggs
by angry Spanish and Portuguese pilgrims outraged at their brutal
tactics. The 90,000 private clients and 4,500 corporate clients
of this bank can no longer access their money and so wages and
bills across Herzegovina are currently going unpaid. Far from
turning swords into ploughshares, it seems, six years of international
administration in Bosnia and Herzegovina have succeeded only in
turning peacekeepers into bank robbers.
The
stated purpose of the raid on the bank was to root out "corruption"
– a convenient catch-all accusation used with gay abandon these
days to get rid of turbulent politicians from Peru to Indonesia
and the Philippines. But this was no ordinary police operation.
The normal procedure when a bank is suspected of handling dirty
money is to freeze the relevant accounts and to apply for the
appropriate seizure orders. It is not to send in tanks to close
the bank and blow up the safe. The suspicion must be that the
bank raid was undertaken to sabotage the finances of the main
Croat political party, the Croatian Democratic Union of Bosnia
and Herzegovina (HDZ), and also to break the economic backbone
of the Bosnian Croats as a whole, who are a generally hardworking
and fairly prosperous lot.
The
bank raid followed the decision, taken in March by the High Representative,
to dismiss the leaders of the HDZ from their elected posts, including
from the collegiate presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, on the
grounds that they were engaged in "anti-Dayton activities."
He also barred them from all future political activity. Their
crime was to have convened a "Croatian National Congress"
last November, with the support of 90% of Bosnian Croats who believe
that such a Congress is better equipped to defend their interests
than the UN High Representative. This followed a long period of
deteriorating relations between the Croats and the UN in Bosnia
and Herzegovina, who feel that their national rights are being
weakened by new electoral laws and other constitutional changes,
introduced by the UN and designed to blend Bosnia’s constituent
peoples into one.
Mr.
Petritsch’s fury at this semi-declaration of independence by the
Croats knew no bounds. The New World Order has one simply rule – you must obey orders – and so exemplary punishment had to be
meted out to the disobedient Croats. He and his staff gaily lambasted
the Croat leaders as "criminals" and "extremists",
even though no convictions have been obtained against them, while
Mr. Petritsch personally accused the Catholic Bishop of Mostar
of spreading hatred and supporting war criminals. Bosnia’s international
administrators evidently have no understanding of one the most
basic principles of Western political civilisation, the presumption
of innocence, and little sense of the responsibility incumbent
on them as important public figures not to make inflammatory statements
which may be prejudicial to any future trial.
Instead,
the powers now vested in the UN administrator of Bosnia and Herzegovina
are as close to pure tyranny as anything which has existed in
recent European history. The decisions of the UN High Representative
are neither democratically legitimised nor subject to the rule
of law. Sniggering admissions that Bosnia and Herzegovina is in
reality "a protectorate" fail to capture the sheer lawlessness
of the UN’s power there, which goes way beyond the powers enjoyed,
say, by a British colonial official in the last century. For instance,
Mr. Petritsch’s "Decision" authorising the bank raid
specifically provides legal immunity from prosecution to the police
and soldiers who carried it out. It also allows his appointee
to close the bank or sell it off at will – possible even to banks
(Hercegovacka Banka is the only bank in Bosnia and Herzegovina
that is not under Austrian owenership). Furthermore, the Decision
itself rests on a reading of the powers laid down in Dayton which
quite literally admits of no limitation. Finally, an appeal lodged
with the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina against
Petritsch’s decision to cancel the outcome of last November’s
elections was dismissed on the simple ground that his decisions
are not subject to judicial review by that or any other Court.
Ever
since the Dayton accords were signed in 1995, Bosnia and Herzegovina
has been a laboratory for the New World Order’s ideal of post-national
politics and multiculturalism. As in the European Union, the underlying
philosophical presupposition is that nationalism leads to war
and that therefore nationhood must be dissolved. Consequently,
the High Representative has repeatedly cancelled the outcome of
elections in recent years because the wrong people – "nationalists"
– had won. The attack is on the Croats now and it has been on
the Serbs in the past. But it cannot be long before even the Muslims
get a taste of the same medicine. Like the Ottoman empire which
it has replaced, the Nato empire in the Balkans has contempt for
all its subject peoples in equal measure.
The
final irony is this. It is a striking fact that the crack troops
of the New World Order very often do not generally come from countries
like Austria which have domestic experiences of dictatorship.
Instead, many of the principal officials of the International
Criminal Tribunal at the Hague, the leading decision-makers in
the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE),
and – as in Mr. Munro’s case – the main henchmen for the UN regime
in Bosnia and Herzegovina are citizens of English-speaking countries.
Something
happens to these assorted Britons, Americans, Canadians and Australians
when they become officials of international organisations. Like
semi-reformed alcoholics let loose in a gin shop, they seem unable
to control themselves if not subject to the strictures of their
own political culture. Perhaps they are just living out some strange
private power-fantasies. Or perhaps, instead, people like our
own Mr. Munro are just getting valuable job experience for their
future role, which cannot be too far off, as administrators of
a genuinely post-national European Union – based on the highly
successful Bosnian model, of course.
|
