[Marxism] Acquitted by the Hague, oppressed Serb nation lives with the results of demonization

[Sayan Bhattacharyya]

On 2/27/07, Fred Feldman <ffeldman at bellatlantic.net> wrote:
>
> Justice delayed ...
> Claire Fox
> February 27, 2007 12:30 PM
>
> Sound familiar? Iraq, of course, is the latest western adventure that
> conjured up a Hitler-like dictator, a new brand of (Islamo) fascism, with
> alleged genocides around every corner. You don't need an international
> court
> to tell you that when a nation is demonised as guilty - whether to justify
> intervention or to make the west look like the world's saviour - there
> will
> be brutal consequences. Carnage and chaos for the innocent are sure to
> follow.


Below is an interesting  case made in favor of intervention by Western
countries. (This appeared in last Sunday's New York Times). I would be
interested in seeing some Marxist rejoinders/rebuttals to Collier's
arguments:

<
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/books/review/Ferguson-t.html?pagewanted=2&ref=world
>

July 1, 2007
 The Least Among Us  By NIALL FERGUSON

<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/books/review/Ferguson-t.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print#secondParagraph>
THE
BOTTOM BILLION  Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done
About It.

By Paul Collier.

205 pp. Oxford University Press. $28.

It is perhaps a sign of how far sub-Saharan Africa still has to go that the
most vigorous — and certainly the best publicized — debate about its
economic future in recent years has been between two American economists
based in New York. On one side of the argument is Jeffrey D. Sachs, the
director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the author of
"The End of Poverty." On the other is William Easterly of New York
University, whose ironically titled "White Man's Burden" lampoons Sachs as a
modern version of a 19th-century utopian.

There is indeed something faintly Victorian about Sachs's messianic yet
parsimonious conviction that Africa can be saved with $75 billion a year in
Western aid. Having spent so much of his energies in the 1990s extolling the
virtues of the free market to any Eastern European government that would
listen, Sachs now argues — with equally unshakable conviction — that the
elimination of African poverty can be achieved through state planning. All
governments need do is improve agricultural technology, provide antimalaria
bed nets, treat diseases like hookworm and distribute antiretroviral
treatments to the H.I.V.-infected.

At times, he is rather reminiscent of Dickens's Mrs. Jellyby in "Bleak
House," "a lady of very remarkable strength of character, who ... has
devoted herself to an extensive variety of public subjects, at various
times, and is at present (until something else attracts her) devoted to the
subject of Africa; with a view to the general cultivation of the coffee
berry — and the natives." In Easterly's opinion, the present generation of
white philanthropists is no more likely than earlier ones to succeed in a
self-appointed (and at times unwittingly imperial) mission of enlightening
the Dark Continent.

Now comes another white man, ready to shoulder the burden of saving Africa:
Paul Collier, the director of the Center for the Study of African
Economiesat Oxford University. A former World Bank economist like
Easterly, Collier
shares his onetime colleague's aversion to what he calls the "headless
heart" syndrome — meaning the tendency of people in rich countries to
approach Africa's problems with more emotion than empirical evidence. It was
Collier who pointed out that nearly two-fifths of Africa's private wealth is
held abroad, much of it in Swiss bank accounts. It was he who exposed the
British charity Christian Aid for commissioning dubious Marxist research on
free trade. And it was he who pioneered a new and unsentimental approach to
the study of civil wars, demonstrating that most rebels in sub-Saharan
Africa are not heroic freedom fighters but self-interested brigands.

Collier is certainly much closer to Easterly on the question of aid. (He
cites a recent survey that tracked money released by the Chad Ministry of
Finance to help rural health clinics. Less than 1 percent reached the
clinics.) Yet "The Bottom Billion" proves to be a far more constructive work
than "The White Man's Burden." Like Sachs, Collier believes rich countries
really can do something for Africa. But it involves more — much more — than
handouts.

Collier's title refers to the 980 million people living in what he calls
"trapped countries," those that are "clearly heading toward what might be
described as a black hole." Not all these people are Africans. Some live in
Bolivia, Myanmar, Cambodia, Haiti, Laos, North Korea and Yemen. But 70
percent of the bottom billion live in Africa, and there is good reason to
expect that proportion to rise.

The notion of the bottom billion matters because most of today's development
strategies (for example, the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals)
focus much less discriminatingly on all developing economies — what used to
be called "the third world." But the world is no longer (as it used to be)
one-sixth rich and five-sixths poor. Thanks to explosive growth in Asia, it
will soon be more like one-sixth rich, two-thirds O.K. and one-sixth poor.
It is this last group, according to Collier, that we need to worry about.
Average life expectancy for the bottom billion is just 50 years. Around one
in seven children dies before the age of 5.

Collier's is a better book than either Sachs's or Easterly's for two
reasons. First, its analysis of the causes of poverty is more convincing.
Second, its remedies are more plausible.

There are, he suggests, four traps into which really poor countries tend to
fall. The first is civil war. Nearly three-quarters of the people in the
bottom billion, Collier points out, have recently been through, or are still
in the midst of, a civil war. Such wars usually drag on for years and have
economically disastrous consequences. Congo (formerly Zaire, formerly the
Belgian Congo) would need 50 years of peace at its present growth rate to
get back to the income level it had in 1960. Unfortunately, there is a
vicious circle, because the poorer a country becomes, the more likely it is
to succumb to civil war ("halve the ... income of the country and you double
the risk of civil war" is a characteristic Collier formulation). And once
you've had one civil war, you're likely to have more: "Half of all civil
wars are postconflict relapses."

[...]

Although it stands on a foundation of painstaking quantitative research,
"The Bottom Billion" is an elegant edifice: admirably succinct and pithily
written. Few economists today can match Collier when it comes to one-liners.
"A flagrant grievance is to a rebel movement what an image is to a
business." Calling the present trade negotiations a "development round" is
like calling "tomorrow's trading on eBay a 'development round.' " And "If
Iraq is allowed to become another Somalia, with the cry 'Never intervene,'
the consequences will be as bad as Rwanda."

If Sachs seems too saintly and Easterly too cynical, then Collier is the
authentic old Africa hand: he knows the terrain and has a keen ear. They
know it's garbage, one aid official told him when he queried Christian Aid's
research, "but it sells the T-shirts."

As Collier rightly says, it is time to dispense with the false dichotomies
that bedevil the current debate on Africa: " 'Globalization will fix it'
versus 'They need more protection,' 'They need more money' versus 'Aid feeds
corruption,' 'They need democracy' versus 'They're locked in ethnic
hatreds,' 'Go back to empire' versus 'Respect their sovereignty,' 'Support
their armed struggles' versus 'Prop up our allies.' " If you've ever found
yourself on one side or the other of those arguments — and who hasn't? —
then you simply must read this book.

Full:  <
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/books/review/Ferguson-t.html?pagewanted=2&ref=world
>