Newsletter: April, 00

Table of Contents:

[The Floating World] [The Revival of Gunboat Diplomacy?]

Colombia as the Next New Jerusalem

It is happening again… Never mind the failures of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Albania or Nicaragua. It seems the revenants of the World’s communist parties and Marxoids are moaning with excitement about events in Colombia. Yes, once again, it seems that a truly revolutionary regime is in the offing and this time (of course) it will finally be the shining new Jerusalem for all the weary political pilgrims.

The phenomenon of this blinkered attraction for any "Progressive" regime has been explored before. For generations, liberals and leftists have been able to overlook deliberate famines, economic disasters and wholesale totalitarian slaughter to bubble about the state that "finally got it right". These idiotic political pilgrims have been matched by even more credulous cretins in their home countries who emotionally bond with the new regime while seldom bothering to emigrate there — more’s the pity. These are the folks who can insist that the likes of Stalin, Hoxha or Ortega can teach Western democracies about civility and proper behavior.

Brace yourself, dear reader, ‘tis about to happen again; this time the paladins of virtue are the cocaine-supported thugs of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Colombia has been bedeviled by violent left-right politics since the 1890s. Perhaps 200,000 people died during la Violenca, 20 years of vicious civil conflict that ended in the early 1960s. However, the Partido Communista de Colombia (PCC) wanted no part of the Liberal-Conservative reconciliation, and as the violence wound down they refused to lay down their arms. Formed in 1966, FARC was the PCC’s military arm. The guerrillas decided to emulate Cuba and developed many links to the Castro government over the years. FARC’s other linkage is with the cocaine industry. The combination has proved potent and these Communist Party guerrillas have been active for decades.

FARC has not been alone in perpetuating guerrilla warfare in Colombia. In 1990, Maoist and Castroist groups were still on the loose. A fourth group, M-19 had just agreed to throw down their guns and operate as an open political party. There were also a clutch a smaller groups in "armed resistance" to the Colombian government. Still, FARC was the largest and best organized of the lot.

Cocaine has been Colombia’s curse since the 1960s. While violent political extremists have been vexatious everywhere in Latin America, the only ones that lasted beyond the end of the Cold War (and the resulting implosion of the Cuban economy) have been those with access to the narcotics industry. Of course, FARC is not the only group in Colombia with a nose for business.

Cocaine also powered a dangerous set of criminal cartels whose extreme wealth corrupted much of the country. The Cartelistas also had an off-and-on relationship with FARC. At times they have been at each other’s throats (usually in a squabble over the spoils), and other times they have actively cooperated to weaken the Colombian government.

In the 1990s, the other Marxist Guerrilla groups slowly faded in numbers and many gave up their arms as a result of the appeals from the government for peace. However, the Colombian crackdown on the Medellin Cocaine Cartel in the early 1990s broke the back of the biggest single business rival to the Marxists. FARC quadrupled in size from 5,000 active "rebels" to 20,000. Its Maoist rival, the ELN merely grew from 2,000 to 5,000. FARC was also able to make enormous improvements in the quality of its arms and accoutrements. As early as 1996, Colombian troops in the field became out-gunned by an enemy with secure communications and better surveillance equipment.

In true revolutionary practice, FARC went on to spread its influence and divide society. Where it could, it destroyed the structure of the government’s authority to replace it with what passed for its own. Otherwise it engaged in terror to goad the usual action-reaction cycle of spiraling atrocity. Typically, the often stung police, military and endangered civilians rose to the bait and fought terror with terror — often with a savagery in excess of that of the guerrillas. Death squads have always appeared in FARC’s presence, and have become more desperate in recent years.

And so to the present pass. As of November 1998 and the opening of peace talks with the Government, FARC controlled some 40% of the country. As far as the PCC is concerned, the rest is up for grabs. Victory, of sorts, is at hand. Of course, while FARC has been busy in the countryside, its PCC partners have been busy in the cities. The trade unions have turned in a series of strikes — for legitimate reasons, the economy is in a shambles, but austerity measures are widely resented. Also, death squads, in the absence of easy guerrilla targets, went for many leftists instead. FARC negotiations with the Pastrana government are also a sign that the authorities are on the ropes.

Enter the wonder-struck international support. As blind to reality as ever, Canadian leftist organizations have been praising FARC and are attempting to campaign on their behalf. The National Action Committee on the Status of Women will debate a resolution of support for the Narcoterrorists er, selfless defenders of Colombian dignity and champions of Social Justice. A prize assortment of Canadian progressives (calling themselves the Tribunal on Human Rights in Colombia) held a mock judicial inquiry into the behavior of one death squad. Somehow they managed to overlook the behaviors that stung these squads into re-emerging.

The die-hards of the Canadian Communist Party have started raising money for FARC — not that the cocaine-rich guerrillas need it. They also sent Central Committee member Helen Kennedy to Colombia at FARC’s invitation. She has been gushing with endless enthusiasm in the People’s Voice (the Party Paper) about the nose-candy revolutionaries. One February 1999 article says it all. "One lasting impression was the lineup of children to get autographs from FARC commander Fabian Ramierez, as he patiently took time to talk to the children. The atmosphere of isolation and intimidation in Bogata was replaced with an overwhelming sense of community."

Given what happened in other countries Helen Kennedy has favored, the children had better get used to lineups. Kennedy, by the way, is the Chair of the Metro [Toronto] Network for Social Justice, one of the architects of the Anti-Harris "Days of Action" protests that attempted to shut Toronto down in 1996.

The Party and some of its allies have been sponsoring tours by FARC members. In early March, for example, the UofT Communists and the Student Christian Movement (an old ally) arranged for one FARC commander to speak on campus. FARC has even set up a Canadian office and has undertaken letter-writing campaigns to Canadian parliamentarians.

It is unlikely that FARC will really be interested in governing any part of Colombia — although their political arm will be extremely useful in ensuring that the country remains ungovernable. FARC has long since made the transition from revolutionary guerrillas to a narcotics-oriented militia, and the responsibility of real government seems to have little appeal. What is important, however, is the illusion of respectability and the legal protections afforded by a façade of political power.

A long time ago, Lenin referred to the first of the starry-eyed political pilgrims and their enthusiastic supporters as "useful idiots". Lenin is gone, the USSR is gone, and the respectability (such as it was) of Marxism is gone. The useful idiot remains.

In the highly stratified society of Tokugawa Japan, one aspect of life was removed from the rigid class structure. The World of brothels and courtesans was held to be a realm apart from the strict conventions of larger society. This "floating world" cut across the real one. Its rules and proprieties were entirely separate, yet it wove through daily life in a number of ways. Everyone in the ordinary scheme of things had access to the floating world, while its regular denizens often ignored the real one.

Most of us tend to think of political and public life as a structured and orderly creation. Countries have borders, customs posts, their own laws and security forces. Binding the world of the nation states and their separate jurisdictions are conventions of laws and agreements. We see the world as one with a lot of fences and barriers — even though our communications and transportation systems have made the world smaller than ever.

Weaving through our world of jurisdictions and countries is an international world. It is mostly inhabited by international agencies, multi-national organizations and a variety of other bodies. Individual denizens of this international world include an equally diverse variety of academics, entrepreneurs, tourists, entertainers, and so on. The vast majority of these inhabitants can be safely assumed to be peaceful in purpose and behavior.

However, with the development of this supranational existence, a new "floating world" has already developed and many terrorists belong to it — as do a variety of other actors. In this world, those who are unencumbered by ethics can move much faster than those who are. Money changes hands at the speed of light, while goods and people can fly across the world in a day. The criminal or terrorist who understands this world is able to stay ahead of the poor plodding police. Within this world are others who can be of use to the crook or insurgent — those bankers, financiers, shipping agents and arms dealers who are not always lawful in their dealings. In some cases, it is even possible for the crook or insurgent to be his own banker or arms dealer. The traffic of the floating world can be complex indeed.

One highly educated RCMP officer who specializes in international financial crime complained to the author that it is almost impossible for him to understand some transactions of the Russian Mafiya. Even a simple money laundering operation might take investigators months (or years) to unravel between seven transactions and four countries. By the time police can close the operation down, tens of millions of dollars have already moved on. Once the operation is shut down, another can be opened in days, or even hours if the connections have already been made.

Many operations are not so simple to investigate. In some cases, three or four different networks may be involved. Part of the profits may have been diverted to purchase arms in China, property in the US, stocks in Canada, or oil in Russia. All of the criminal groups involved may have their own insurgent allies who protect sanctuary areas or safeguard smuggling routes.

In recent months Osama Bin Laden has made it to the headlines from his earlier obscurity in the depths of feature articles in specialist news magazines. As one of the nexus points for a vast network of Islamic Fundamentalists, bin Laden is another example of the floating world. In the terrorist world, he is nothing special insofar as his violent skills are concerned — gunmen and bombers are plentiful enough. As a source of ideological inspiration, he is of little account as well. The tenets of his violent version of Islam did not originate with him and will survive his death or capture.

What makes bin Laden special is his connection to the floating world — he and other enormously rich sponsors of the Fundamentalist network are part of the transnational corporate and financial spheres. As the US is now finding, it is impossible to locate his money with a maze of numbered shell companies in different jurisdictions. For those who are armed and equipped with that money, it is no great problem to be one month in New York City, another in the Philippines, another in Pakistan and another in Kenya. Money makes other resources available; IDs, passports, detonators or phony credit cards.

Only through enormous effort and considerable cooperation can the police forces of some 20-30 nations hope to deal with this floating network. Often, cooperation comes after tragedy, when the far off and exotic zealots in Afghanistan and the Sudan translates into truck bombs and shootings in the streets of Europe and North America.

Another example of operations in the floating world comes from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). This Sri Lankan guerrilla force has organized its largely criminal fundraising activities on a global scale. They have intimidated law enforcement authorities on four continents with the ferocity and volume of their deeds, but more so through their rapid acquisition of political connections. Lacing all these enterprises together is a network of front groups, shell companies, couriers, web-sites, and family/caste ties. They change faster than authorities can adapt, and are never too embarrassed or flustered to lie, misdirect and deceive.

In one classic case of Tiger brazenness, the Sri Lankan government bought a large quantity of mortar ammunition from a Tanzanian producer. The Tanzanians arranged for a shipping company to carry over 30,000 mortar bombs to Sri Lanka, the they had no idea that the company and its vessel were owned by the Tamil Tigers. The ship apparently vanished — as did the shell company that owned it. It then appeared under a new name and ownership elsewhere in the Indian Ocean. The mortar bombs were then delivered to the Sri Lankan Army — one salvo at a time.

After the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack, Japanese investigators swooped in on almost every aspect of Aum Shinrikyo’s operations. What they found stunned them. The 40,000 member Japanese cult had a presence in Australia, Russia, Ukraine, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, the former Yugoslavia and the US. It was actively engaged in the production of chemical and biological arms and was working to acquire nuclear arms. It owned property in several different nations, and had tapped into the vast underground Russian arms market.

The floating world touches Canada. In a broad sense, crime in Canada has become "internationalized". Some of the money earned by a crack-addicted streetwalker in Vancouver will end up as ammunition in the rifle of a Colombian Marxist guerrilla. A heroin addict in Halifax is doing the same thing for a fundamentalist terrorist in Lebanon or Tajikistan. A Toronto bank that extends $40,000 in a loan to a Tamil with a full set of false IDs is arming teenage suicide bombers in Sri Lanka. Black market cigarettes in Calgary may be underwriting the costs of arming an Aboriginal street gang in Winnipeg — hardly international in scope, but his AK-47 either originated in China or Eastern Europe.

All of these activities take place in and around Canada, but hardly touch the lives of most Canadians. In many ways, most of us are barely cognizant of the streetwalker, the addict or the gang member. Their lives are separate from the daily round that most of us experience — but this does not make their lives any less real than our own. In the same way, on a transoceanic flight or a session of surfing the net, one might brush up against the floating world without even knowing it.

The overall size of this floating world should not be underestimated. By a conservative RCMP estimate, the annual Canadian narcotic market is worth at least $10 Billion, if not more. Add in another minimal $2 Billion for the underground market in alcohol and tobacco. Then add a modest 50% for other bank and credit card fraud, arms, extortion rackets, refugee smuggling, etc. The floating world is perhaps an $18 Billion per year in business in Canada alone. Imagine the size of its global operations and annual revenues -- $400 Billion, $800 Billion, more?

While this is rightly seen as organized criminal behavior, crime in is firm partnership with insurgency in Canada and around the world. Money is available to corrupt politicians and officials, destabilize countries, and buy arms and specialist services. However, while the floating world exists, it exists in its parts. The bin Laden network, the Colombian cocaine cartels, the LTTE and Aum Shinrikyo have no common central organization, no shared leadership or direction. The floating world itself can only be vicious, tenacious and resourceful in the defence of its parts. But each of those parts can use corrupt governments to hamper diplomacy, lawyers to inhibit investigation, and terror against more serious threats.

This floating world may provide a most serious threat in the future. In many ways, it is a powerful rival to the concept of modern nation states. It allows insurgents to have better access to sophisticated weaponry and may soon give them the wherewithal for biological and nuclear arms, or more powerful computers for "hacking" attacks.

Our construction of nation states is fragile. The Israeli academic Martin van Crevald observed some ten years ago that nation-state structures in many parts of the world were fragile — being only a recent invention. Other writers have noticed that some "nations" exist only in having a place in the atlas and an ambassador of sorts at the UN. Others seem more attuned to the floating world than our more constrained one. The nation state was first constructed in Western Europe, which now seems increasingly interest in forging other arrangements. Attempts to check the growth of the floating world have only begun to take shape, and as yet lack the resolve necessary for success. Soon we may all have to look at the world in a different way.

At the beginning of the 20^th Century, President Teddy Roosevelt reminded Americans of the old adage to speak softly and carry a big stick. Few sticks come larger than a squadron of F-15E Strike Eagles with LANTIRN pods and GBU-15 bombs, especially if they follow a wave of Block III TLAM-D cruise missiles and have AWACS and J-STARS to guide them. While the modern penchant for acronyms mitigates against Homeric narratives, there is no way to hide from this stick. Neither rain, nor snow, nor gloom of night, nor active air defences can keep these deliverymen from their appointed rounds.

One trait of modern airpower (insofar as US/Western technologies go) is that it is virtually unstoppable and risk free. The temptation to use it appears to be a very strong one indeed.

There was a time, not so very long ago, that whenever Western sensibilities or interests were irritated by truculent locals, a gunboat would be anchored off shore. Then, a brisk bombardment would serve notice that someone had been misbehaving. The morality of gunboat diplomacy has been questioned throughout this century and often with good reason. However, the use of bombardment to send a message was typical of an age when Western nations were far more confident about their own morality.

Admittedly, the days of gunboat diplomacy had mixed effects. The Anglo-French thumping of an anchored Turkish fleet at Navarino in 1827 told the Turks to clean up their act (which they did for a while) and get out of Greece. Modern Greece owes its existence to gunboat diplomacy. Some 13 years later, the same fleets bombarded Beirut to protect Turkey from a rebel sultan from Egypt. The shortest war in history was a 30 minute affray in which the thrifty Royal Navy first shelled the palace of the Sultan of Zanzibar and then made him pay for the expended ammunition. This helped finish off the slave trade in East Africa.

On the other hand, the French bombardments of Cochin China in 1858 and Madagascar in the 1890s were straightforward exercises in imperialism. The bombardments that attended the 1^st and 2^nd Opium Wars in China might be said to have been a desirable action by the most callous of free trade economists, but others may harbor major reservations. Other episodes of gunboat diplomacy (the 1863 shelling of Kagoshima for example) served a simple message to local malcontents — keep your hands off the Europeans.

Gunboat diplomacy really is a simple exercise. The one with the gunboat has to have an Olympian self-confidence in his own moral superiority. It also helps to have a helplessly weak target that has been misbehaving and is virtually friendless. Then, the rod of correction can be used to send a message to the target, telling him that he had better mend his ways or real trouble will follow.

After a long hiatus, it appears that gunboat diplomacy is back.

After many fruitless months of speaking softly, NATO unleashed the stick on Serbia in late March 1999. Of course, the American portion of the stick was the largest, but aircraft from 11 different NATO partners were involved. This presented some historic ironies. The Turks were thumping on the Serbs again, as they had done in days of yore, and the Luftwaffe was firing its first shots in anger since 1945; but this time it was done in partnership with 17 other nations. Strangest of all, to some, might have been the idea of Canadian CF-18s dropping laser guided bombs, but Canadian soldiers had shot at several local parties earlier in the 1990s.

The hapless targets of all this attention are the Serbs. The London Times’ Guide to the Peoples of Europe (a well-thumbed reference book here) does not treat the Serbs charitably. Descendants of 7^th Century Slavic invaders, the Serbs converted to Orthodox Christianity, thus sealing themselves off from Western cultural currents. These Slavic invaders were highly fractured by local geography and tribal distinctions, but history was going to compound the problem.

In the late 14^th Century, the Turks started to overrun almost all of what was recently Yugoslavia. This further isolated the Serbs from the European mainstream. A great many Serbs, including the repressed descendents of the heretical Bogomil sect, converted to Islam. Most of these were concentrated in the area of Bosnia-Herzegovina and are now called Bosnians.

Two of the other major factions of the Southern Slavs, the Croats and the Slovenes, came under the influence of the Catholic Church, the Venetians, and later the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Many Serbs resettled in Bosnia and Croatia as the Turkish Empire began to wane after the 16^th Century.

Victims of history, the Serbian national character only really began to gel in the early 19^th Century. They were conscious of being a restive Christian minority under Turkish rule, and from this came a tradition of stubbornness, militancy and a twisted pride in persecution. Their revolts against the Turks in 1804 and 1815 led to a quasi-autonomous Serbian state that only became fully recognized after the Congress of Berlin in 1878. The early 19^th Century’s nationalistic and romantic ideologies found a ready chord among educated Serbs and kindled many of the problems that still affect the region.

Iljia Garasanin (1812-1874) was the Serbian minister of Internal Affairs in 1844 when he outlined a program to unite all Serbs within a Serbian state. This was immediately embraced by Serbian nationalist ideologues. The first element of the program was that Serbian identity rests with their language and the Orthodox faith — thus those Macedonians, Bosnian Muslims and Montenegrins who had "lost" their true Serbian identities could be returned to the fold (with some prompting of course). The second element was that the Serbs were entitled to a great kingdom of their own because of their resistance to the Turks. The idea of Serbian leadership was taken for granted, and the Serbs retained a hostility to the West second only to that held for the Turks.

Like many ideological constructs, the Serbian nationalist version of history overlooks too many inconsistencies — like the point that a large portion of the Turkish Army of 1389 (at the "legendary" battle of Kosovo) was made up of Serbs. Moreover, Serbia remained independent until the 1430s, and many Serbs cooperated with the Turks after that.

Around the turn of the 20^th Century, many Croatian nationalists were promoting a separate idea; that the South Slav identity could supersede specific religious identities and form the basis of allegiance to a new unified kingdom. As it turned out, this idea was the one implemented at the end of the First World War. Of the hodgepodge of peoples who formed the new Yugoslavia, the Serbs were the most numerous and soon dominated the political structure — largely to their own benefit. This rapidly converted the barely suppressed nationalist instincts of their new compatriots into the poisonous hatreds that exploded during World War Two and again (after Tito had reconstructed Yugoslavia) in the 1990s.

The two attempts to create Yugoslavia both failed for the same reason — in a multicultural state full of sensitive minorities, too many Serbs clung to their 19^th Century manifesto of supremacy.

What has been left to the Serbs are two major problems: Their nationalist agenda has been frequently thwarted by outside powers, and their own self-image rests on a sense of historic persecution. To compensate for what they perceive as injustices, they have been aggressive in the creation of a Serbian state at the expense of others. As the Guide points out: "Serbian nationalists portray the Serbs as victims throughout their history, from their defeat by the Ottoman Turks in 1389 and subsequent victimization to Turkish rule, to their perceived victimization by the regime of Tito from 1945 to 1980. Past offences are remembered, and grudges harbored over centuries. The international isolation of Serbia during the Balkan crisis of the 1990s served only to bolster Serbian defensiveness and sense of only being able to rely on themselves."

When left to their own devices, Serbian nationalists will pursue their long-sought goals at the expense of other people. Outside opposition to this validates their belief that the world is against them. A clinical psychologist might have a name for this condition, and a very frustrated parent might recognize the willfulness of a destructive toddler who must be supervised and resents it. Or, in the dynamics of a school yard, one might think of a small bully who remembers every slight, seeks to take out his frustrations on others, and interprets every attempt to rein him in as bullying in itself.

This left NATO in the role of a liberal teacher in a climate that disapproves of corporal punishment — who cannot ignore the problem but already has taken every reasonable measure that she can. In the end, everything else having failed and with no other recourse, the teacher is left with the stick. However, the wider community is even more uncomfortable with using the stick than is the teacher. Even worse, the stick probably won’t work and the teacher has no real idea of what a dose of corporal punishment would achieve anyway.

One almost immediate result of the bombing was the validation of the ideological notion that the world is against the Serbs — proof being immediately available. Whatever else transpires from the conflict, it has given Serbs a whole new grudge to nurse, preserve, and pass down through the generations. It is also telling that the bully immediately became worse, and the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo accelerated.

In the defence of the Serbs, it must be said they live in a schoolyard full of other bullies, sniveling tattle-tales, and sneaks. In the Yugoslavian conflicts of the 1990s, the Serbs might have been the most murderous, but when it cape to rape, slaughter, arson and pillage, they really didn’t have much to teach the Croats about technique. When it came to double-dealing and duplicity, the Bosnians were their equals. When it came to letting gangsters wear the guise of patriots, Arkan (or Mr. and Mrs. Milosevic for that matter) had nothing to teach the Albanians. Even today’s NATO intervention in Kosovo cannot be thought of as a black-white issue. In the Balkans, everyone wears soiled gray.

Still, NATO’s stick is hitting hard. Air strikes have caused enormous material destruction. The Serbs have lost billions of dollars in military hardware and billions more in hard-won infrastructure. By early May, they will probably lose hundreds of soldiers and tens of civilians. But the bully in the Serbian nationalist tradition will treasure the slight. It will confirm his belief that the world is against him and he is therefore justified in being a bully to look after his own interests.

In the 19^th Century, gunboat diplomacy rarely solved anything in the long run. When the smoke cleared and the survivors crawled out of the rubble, they would accede to the gunboat’s immediate demands. However, those who were bombarded harbored their resentments until they could repay the shelling with interest -- and some accounts have yet to be settled.

The problem in the rump of Yugoslavia is that speaking softly never worked, and the stick had to be applied. The next problem is that the stick really won’t work either. So what comes next?

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca