Presidents Mohamed Suharto of Indonesia, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire are the top three members of a particularly unpalatable premier league. Between them the three leaders embezzled somewhere between $25bn and $50bn from their respective countries, as well as various donor nations, the UN, the IMF, World Bank and any number of international aid or development agencies, according to data collected by corruption study group Transparency International.
Apart from an insatiable appetite for impoverishing their own populations, the trio have something else in common. All three were, for much of their careers, supported politically and militarily by the west, particularly by the United States and its allies including Britain and France. Mobutu, helped to power by the CIA and bankrolled in his crazy schemes by the US Export-Import Bank, plundered around $5bn alone from a country where national income per person is still hardly more than $100 a year.
The realpolitik justification for aiding dictators such as Mobutu was of course the existence of the cold war. In the crude - on so many levels - apocryphal terms of a former US secretary of state, a leader such as Suharto "was a son of a bitch, but he was our son of a bitch". What mattered was that the likes of Ferdinand Marcos and other dictators - such as Jean-Claude Duvalier, who raked off at least $300m or so during his 15-year reign as president of Haiti - were tough on communism. Little else was important. Or so they thought at the time.
| We were not going to lose the Cold War. |
The cold war finished, but history failed to end - despite predictions to the contrary. In place of the old "war on communism", we have a new "war on terror", and a US administration that is once again judging its friends not by the quality of their souls but by geo-political calculation. The so-called "coalition of the willing" almost certainly includes leaders willing to line their own pockets. This is the danger of choosing allies by dint of their muscle alone: it rewards the bully and the tyrant, while penalising the honest democrat who dares to disagree.
| Guardian misses the whole story: other than Perv, we've succeeded in the WoT by not investing ourselves too much in any one dictator. If Karsai, the new Iraqi leaders, et al. can't bring about democracy they'll lose our favor real quick. And there are some dictators who are going to get theirs in the near future -- Assad, the black turbans, a few Soodi princes, and mebbe even lil' Kim. |
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