04/10/09 – Mark Almond – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
It's my pleasure to introduce Mark Allman.
He's a lecturer in modern history at Oriel College, Oxford, and is chair of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group.
He's on the phone right now from Ankara, Turkey.
How are you doing, Mark?
Very well, thanks.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Welcome back to the show.
Thanks.
It's a pleasure.
Okay, so we've got a couple of important issues to discuss here today.
First of all, Moldova.
I have to admit, while I give myself a little bit of credit, I guessed that Moldova was somewhere near Romania.
But before that, I didn't even know where this country was, really.
I looked it up, so now I know.
But I imagine that most Americans have no idea where Moldova is, and might be surprised to find out if, in fact, it's really any of their business what's going on in that country right now.
So I was wondering, there's all the news reports about some Twitter revolution and all the kids out in the street, and the makings of the kind of color revolutions that we've seen before in Serbia and Ukraine and Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, an attempted one in Lebanon, I guess, back in 2006.
So I was wondering if you could just kind of give us the lowdown and tell us what you know about the situation there, who's in power and who's against them, and what do the election monitors say and all that kind of stuff.
Well, as you say, it's a small country, which, although I've been to many times, I don't blame people for not being familiar with.
It's a small country sandwiched between Ukraine and Romania.
It used to be part of the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union.
People speak Romanian on the whole, about two-thirds or more of the population, but it's not been part of Romania apart from a brief period from 1920 to 1941.
And in a sense, it's a bit like Austria in relation to Germany.
People speak the same language, but some people think we're actually two different countries.
Some people want to unite.
The issue, though, is that it's in a sensitive position because NATO has allowed Romania to join, and the EU has accepted Romania as a member.
So the borders of the West, the United States and its classic allies, have now advanced right up to the old Soviet Union.
And in Russia, there are people who say, wait a minute, we've agreed to let the Berlin Wall come down to allow East European countries to be independent, took away the Soviet troops.
James Baker said, don't worry, we're not going to push NATO and its military components right up to the borders of the Soviet Union or Russia.
And that's changed over the last few years.
And in the case of Moldova, one of the tragic situations in many ways is that the Moldovans, when they got independence with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, like the other 15 republics, listened to the wise words of all the Western economists and George Soros, and they were told, you're mainly an agricultural society, but agriculture, that's old hat, you should move into high tech, so close down collective farms and move into, as it were, new technology.
Well, it proved easier to close down the farming than to develop the new technology.
And the place went into a terrible economic cycle of decline, so that although it was accepted into the World Trade Organization and had nice pats on the back for meeting various Western standards, in practice, it became desperately poor, even by communist standards.
And a large part of the population migrated to the West, into Romania and into Western Europe.
And Moldova boasts the status of being the country with the highest amount of foreign remittances from workers working abroad.
Now, your listeners will be able to guess that if, like Honduras, Guatemala or El Salvador, you have a lot of people living on remittances from people working in Texas and California, that means they're working in a rich country, you know, still now a rich country, but it doesn't make that country of origin rich at all.
It means it's a very dependent, poor country.
And that, I'm afraid, is the status of Moldova and also, for that matter, Romania.
And so now there's this disputed election in this troubled land.
I guess the party in power are communists, but they hold elections, huh?
That's kind of nice.
Well, I think the situation, in a sense, is partly a generational thing, partly because younger people have tended to move away to get work.
Older people say, I didn't like communism in the 1980s, but what happened to me in the 1990s makes me nostalgic for the communist days.
So the communists have won on the ticket of we will sort of at least keep some of the old situation going.
Because one of the problems is that you and I, most people listening to this program, probably think that some kind of capitalism is the best economic system.
But we also know, and we've had it brought home to us rather sharply in the last few months, that not every kind of capitalism works very well.
Some kinds of capitalism turn out to be policy schemes.
And unfortunately, the Moldovans, if you like, had an early version of this in the 1990s.
So a lot of people switched back to the old communist party, which was able to say, well, we are critical of this.
Although they're not that communist.
It's not as though they've closed down private shops or anything like that.
It's more that they're a kind of British Labour Party of the 1980s type.
And they win the election.
But there are groups that don't like that.
And they are both domestically, there are younger people who say, if we have communists in power, we'll never get to be accepted to the EU.
We're sort of trapped in a small country somewhere beyond the bright lights of the West.
And then there are people in the West who say, the communists, after all, basically still have certain sort of nostalgia for Moscow.
They still cooperate with the Russians a bit.
We don't want them because we want to expand NATO and to expand our sphere of influence.
And so you get a community of interest.
Some of the younger people can be told that it's going to be cool and trendy to be with the West.
And you don't like these old boys who are nostalgic for the days long before you were born, because you were born in, say, 1989.
And there are Westerners putting money into these groups, funding the NGOs and the critics of the government, who in practice, even the Western election observers couldn't find anything wrong with the election.
I have a colleague here who speaks both Russian and Romanian.
He was an election observer this time.
I've been in Moldova in the past.
And he said that it was the best election he'd seen conducted there.
And as we know from our own elections in Britain and America, no election is perfect.
It's always something goes wrong.
Somebody is not on the list who should be on the list.
Somebody is on the list who shouldn't be on it and so on.
But in practice, he didn't see anything wrong.
But he also felt that a lot of young people were resentful of the older people.
The older people are going to be the majority voters.
The older people are going to vote for the existing system, which at least has stabilized their rather poor lives.
And the younger people are bedazzled by the bright lights of the West and to some extent by the new technology, which they are more likely to be familiar with.
So is there any kind of nefarious influence whenever we see mobs of young people demanding an election be rerun in the street?
I usually just assume that George Soros or USAID or something is behind it.
Is there any evidence of that?
Well, there's certainly an element of that.
In that, some of the people who have been organizing the kind of flash mobs, as they would call them, sending the Twitter messages out, getting the mobile phones activated, are from NGOs that are actually funded from the West by things like USAID and by George Soros.
And there's also the influence of Romania.
As I said, back between 1920, the end of the First World War, and 1940, Moldova was part of Romania.
Maybe most Moldovans, being Romanian speakers, could accept that.
It hasn't been part of Romania since, and a lot of the older Moldovans don't really feel Romanian.
But there's quite a powerful Romanian nationalist wing in Romania that wants it, and to some extent they also support people in Moldova.
And you see, one of the things we have is a problem of language.
You'll see that the main opposition party in Moldova to the Communists are called the Liberal Democrats.
Now, that probably sounds to most English-speaking ears like a vaguely nice, well-intentioned sort of group of people.
But in fact, Liberal Democrat in this case is more like Russia's Zhirinovsky Party of the Liberal Democrats.
They're Romanian nationalists.
They're not, you know, Al Gore-style tree-huggers, if I can put it that way.
And they, of course, alarm quite a few people who feel they don't necessarily want to be in a nationalistic Romania.
But we also have to remember that the economic crisis that affects everybody also affects Romania, and Romania had elections coming up for the president.
And actually, I was thinking about the whole Moldovan situation, and you say the allegations of election fraud.
The last time I saw fraud was in November of 2004, which was evident in Romania.
But it was by the opposition.
The then leader of the opposition has now been president.
Whether he was behind it, I wouldn't like to say.
But his supporters were obviously involved in various situations where they were coming out to vote several times around on what the Romanians would call the carousel.
You could not only vote where you were registered to vote, you know, in your hometown or whatever, but also if you were traveling, you could vote.
And I found in railway stations and at airports lots of people who were obviously supporters of the one candidate turning out to vote.
And they also had the orange stickers and the orange scarves that were at the same time going on in Ukraine.
And they were getting ready with a demonstration in the center of the Romanian capital, Bucharest, to complain about their guy losing and saying it was all cheating, when, to their surprise, the other guy said, well, it's a very narrow election, but I think your guy won by a few thousand votes.
The problem was perhaps the opposition actually massaged those few thousand votes.
Because I think one of the problems we have here now in Moldova, a little country, but it represents a big problem, is the assumption that only the government can cheat, whereas actually politics is about power, and even oppositions can be quite ruthless in trying to get it.
And I think the government in Moldova has made a big mistake by saying that we'll let the votes be recounted, we'll let the voters' registers be checked, because we have nothing to hide.
Now that, of course, is in many ways to their credit.
They have nothing to hide, let these things be checked.
But they're also trying to prove a negative.
If I was a trial attorney and my client was asked to prove that he hadn't done something, as opposed to ask the prosecution to prove he had, I would say to my client, don't go into trying to prove a negative, because it's impossible to prove a negative.
And also, in practice, in an election of several million voters, there's bound to be some irregularity.
As we know in Britain and America, we have irregularities.
I'm not saying that it disqualifies our elections, but I think if we're honest, we would admit that in localities, things go wrong.
And if, therefore, you were to say, I take responsibility, and if anything's gone wrong, then I've cheated, then you look rather bad.
Is there much pressure in the West or interest groups within NATO who want to bring Moldova into NATO?
And is there any real strategic value in such a thing?
Or is it just trying to get all of Eastern Europe, all the former Warsaw Pact states, into NATO now?
Well, I think there's a kind of inertia.
You meet the average person who says, we've got a huge economic crisis.
Why are we concerned about abroad in quite the same way as we should be dealing with our own problems?
But we have to remember that in Washington, in London, in Brussels, in the NATO bureaucracy, there are people whose job it is to expand NATO, to expand the influence of the West.
They have budgets, they have careers, they've got pensions on the line.
And so there's a whole apparatus of pressure to carry on down this line, which just through inertia goes on that way, leaving aside, if you like, any grand design.
It's just part of their job to do it.
And in a sense, they could say, well, we've very successfully over the last 10 or 12 years, developed this people power, color coded revolution, as you said, model.
You know, why don't we use it again?
It works.
We know how to do it.
And I think there's this problem that in some ways, the foreign policy of the West, the United States is the most important country, but also the European Union, countries in NATO, is really now run by the bureaucrats, by the people nobody's elected.
Most of us never heard of, but they are actually carrying on down a line that suits them, that they are comfortable with, that suits their bureaucratic agendas, but actually is potentially very dangerous because we saw with Georgia last August, that if we push too hard, like, you know, whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, countries like Russia will say, you are threatening us.
And we can see if the same situation applied in reverse.
If Russia or China began to have allies in Canada and Mexico, the United States, understandably, would feel slightly threatened, even if Russia and China said, oh, we're all market economies today.
There's nothing to worry about.
We're all just helping our friends and building up a confidence zone.
The United States, understandably, would be a bit worried if that was the case.
Well, the Russians feel, and whether President Obama is, you know, clued into this, I don't know.
But I think the problem is that, to some extent, we have, you know, the national security agencies have agendas of their own, which the elected politicians very often fall in line with, rather than being in charge of.
And, you know, what goes on in Moldova, what goes on in Romania, but also in Ukraine and Georgia, creates this area of tension, which the ordinary voters in America and Britain and Europe don't really know.
Don't really know where the places are, but suddenly could come back to haunt us.
We have, after all, had a very unpleasant, risky situation back in August last year in Georgia.
Well, and in fact, this is one of the things I was going to work my way over here is Georgia.
Well, I want to ask about sort of the larger picture, because if you just look at a map of Eurasia and you see these are the new NATO states, these are the states that are coming into NATO.
I don't know which color you want to shade Moldova for in the midst of a push, which could bring together a pro-Western, bring to power a pro-Western government, that kind of thing.
And then beyond that, just all the basing rights that we've, that the U.S. at least, has worked out in Azerbaijan and in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.
And there are just bases everywhere.
And if you just look right at the map, it would be pretty easy to conclude that it's really all about Russia.
Then again, I've heard it argued that, no, it's really just all about encircling Iran.
And I wonder if you think that there's a real agenda beyond this sort of bureaucratic inertia that you talk about.
If there's a real agenda on the part of NATO to permanently occupy Central Asia, the so-called long war, in order to control those oil resources or whatever the game might be.
And if so, then how come it seems like the European Union types don't really want to go along?
Like, for example, their reluctance to escalate in Afghanistan, when it seems like, you know, the Afghan war against the terrorists is the perfect excuse to expand just that kind of dominance in that part of the world.
Well, there is a, I feel like one of the things is there is a clash between what I could call, I suppose, the Brzezinski types, the grand strategists, the Western domination who say, you know, we are good, we are democratic and free market, and therefore we are wise and we should rule.
And then actually quite a lot of the businessmen, the big businesses in France and Germany that get their oil and gas from Russia and via Russia from Central Asia.
The businesses say, all the expanding NATO causing trouble in Russia is causing the Russians to be awkward with us.
They turn off the pipes every now and again.
And that's very bad if you're Siemens or big German company making products, which uses a lot of energy, you don't want to find insecurity.
So they say, it's all very well for these grand strategy types who say, we've got this project that will establish democracy and rationality and free market, but actually they're bad for the economy at this moment.
So I think there's an interesting division, particularly in Europe, where you have businesses that deal a lot with Russia.
Whereas, shall we say, for instance, the United States doesn't get a significant amount of energy from Central Asia or from Russia at all.
So you can, if you like, play the game of grand strategy in Washington with Russia.
And if the Russians cut off the gas pipelines through Ukraine, it's awkward for the Germans, the Italians and the French, but it doesn't affect life in Texas or Washington.
So to some extent, there's partly a simple fact that the Europeans are nearer Russia and some of them have important business dealings.
Others feel we're nearer Russia.
So if there's a blow up, we could be the ones who take the backburn.
And then also there is a practical question, which is, as you say, the world of Iran and then of Russia.
Nobody wants Iran to have nuclear weapons, but a lot of people wonder whether having a war is the best way to stop that and whether the price might not be greater than the benefits.
But the other side of the bases, which as you say, you have bases in Iraq, you have bases in Afghanistan and other places in Central Asia and so on, and links through the Caucasus.
They do surround Iran, but they also surround Russia.
The classic question is, which bedeviled the UN and the League of Nations before it, how to define the difference between an offensive and a defensive weapon?
We have the same problem.
How do we define the difference between a base to encircle Iran and a base to encircle Russia?
You may start out with the main priority is that Iran is perceived to be the trouble.
But once you have the base, of course, it can turn its face in a different direction.
And this is what the Russians fear.
On the other hand, I think some Russians, of course, take a certain pleasure in seeing the difficulties the United States and its allies have in Afghanistan now.
They are able to say, you used to laugh at us with our problems with Afghanistan in the 80s.
Now you discover it's not so simple.
And so I think there was a split, in fact, in Moscow between those Russians who say that they should invert Brzezinski's famous comment.
Brzezinski said in 1978, let's give the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
The United States should support the Mujahideen Muslim rebels against the Soviet-backed government in order to draw in Soviet troops to make the Russians pay a terrible price comparable to what the United States had paid in Vietnam.
And to some extent, obviously, he succeeded.
But now there are Russians who say, let's not actually be awkward about the United States being in Afghanistan because in a way it's payback time for them because there's a side of the Russians that, of course, feels that the Soviet Union collapsed.
They gave up peacefully, broadly speaking, peacefully, huge tracts of territory.
And they've been not rewarded with, if you like, genuine friendship and cooperation.
And so they now want to be awkward.
And to some extent with this world economic crisis, Russia is in a weak position.
It suffers, but in some ways, proportionally, it suffers less in terms of political influence.
The bigger the crisis, the more problems there are for the United States with all of these commitments, which may look very grand if you're in the military national security bureaucracy with all these bases and all the projects you have.
But obviously for the United States economy, for the US taxpayer, the burden of these things is very considerable.
And so there's a kind of perverse situation, if you like, where some people in Russia and China and so on encourage President Obama to continue those policies that George Bush had, albeit, if you like, with a very different public relations atmosphere because they see it as weakening America still further.
And so America, you know, there may be people in Washington, as I said, if you like, the Brzezinski School, which is quite influential in the Obama administration that still sees Russia as being the big bad enemy to be encircled and done down.
But it's not entirely clear that this is working out according to plan, at least if I was the American taxpayer.
I'm not sure I necessarily think the plan is worth the price.
Well, I wonder if it was ever designed to benefit the American people as a whole.
I guess that's a whole other conversation.
But I mean, for example, you look at America's relationship with Georgia.
It's not just because American policy makers like Misha Kashvili.
It's because the BTC pipeline runs across that land.
And if they make it go that way, then it doesn't have to cross Russian territory.
And so that's what's going on there.
And now it looks like you mentioned the war last August, which was a disaster for Georgia.
Apparently now there are 10,000 people out in the street demanding that his government fall.
And it makes me wonder whether the Americans have turned on him, whether George Soros and USAID are back in action there, too.
Well, I think the problem for President Saakashvili is that the very powerful Western forces, both governmental and people like Soros, who backed him to come to power and did so much to help him and to present him as being the new model democrat and reformer, have rather withdrawn their support.
Their silence is very ominous that we don't have the chorus of what a great man he is and he's really our friend and so on.
And so he's quite isolated.
On the other hand, they don't particularly want to see him fall if it's going to be a victory for the Russians, if you like.
I happen myself to think that there isn't any serious pro-Russian party in Georgia.
So basically, if you look at the protesters, they say, Uncle Sam, Queen Elizabeth, you should support us because we are the true friends of the West.
Saakashvili is not only incompetent in terms of his foreign policy in promoting the Russians, he's also corrupt, he's also a petty despot, and he's not the real democrat that he claimed to be.
But we are the real democrats, we're the real friends of the West, and we'll have to see whether they turned out to be any better.
I suspect after a decent interval, Mr. Saakashvili will be persuaded that on health grounds, he should retire, and a new figure will be introduced, and that person will be acclaimed as the model democrat, the great economic reformer, and so on.
The problem for Georgia, as for many of these small countries, is that their economies have been wrecked.
70 years of communism didn't help, but the 20 years of post-communism have been a very misguided venture.
They have, for instance, purely a Rontier system of depending on the pipeline, and part of the politics of Georgia is you have this very valuable pipeline going through the country, whoever controls the fees for the transit of the oil and gas, whoever controls the customs, makes a lot of money.
It doesn't seem to come into the Georgian public treasury very much, but somebody's getting the money, and so there's a lot of competition for that.
But of course, it's not really the basis of a modern, developed, all-round economy, but the politicians fight over those scraps, and again, I feel this is a big problem with many of the Western advisers who've talked about the market economy, talked about proper modern democracy, and so on.
In practice, provided people have said the slogans we want to hear, we love NATO, we don't like the Russians, or whatever, we've ignored their domestic agendas, which are very often not really very market-orientated.
They're really about controlling and slicing up the cake to suit themselves, and Georgia has suffered for 20 years from that.
Unfortunately, even if Stavrishvili was to be replaced, it would necessarily change, because many of the people who are his critics today were his supporters in 2003, just as he and his supporters in 2003 had been Shevardnadze's supporters before that, and then suddenly they turned against Shevardnadze, who, as you can remember, had been the winner of the Enron Prize for Public Service, received it from the hands of James Baker, and so on.
And then suddenly, like Enron itself, Shevardnadze's standing as a great public figure imploded.
And I'm afraid this will happen to Stavrishvili, but I'm not sure, unfortunately.
On past form, we can be confident that one of his former ministers, who's now leading the opposition in one form or another, will really make a big difference.
And we may just see the same cycle of Western media saying that now, at long last, that Georgia is going to begin the full process of reform and market economy.
That rhetoric will begin again, but the actual cycle will just remain the same.
Well, do you think that the push to bring Georgia into NATO has been halted, at least for now?
I mean, I guess it was supposed to happen last December, right?
Yeah, well, the big problem is, of course, the fact that Stavrishvili provoked the war with Russia, because whatever the rights and wrongs of the two breakaway regions of Georgia, of Hathia and South Ossetia, there was a peaceful situation.
There were these Russian peacekeepers keeping the two sides apart.
And when the Georgian army attacked, of course, they killed 15 Russian soldiers, as well as various people in the territory of South Ossetia.
This was a very irresponsible and radical act.
And I think at least some of the European members of NATO said, we don't want a third world war, but we certainly don't want a third world war caused over an issue, a place that none of us have heard of.
At least, you know, I think if you're going to have a war, you have to be able to locate the place on the map and spell its name before you actually start launching the missile.
Right, yeah, they should have to do South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Yeah, yeah.
And spawn correctly on the first try.
And get a 100% vote in the House.
Yeah, and, you know...
And, in fact, Dick Cheney backed off on that one, right?
Dick Cheney said, hey, you can't do that.
And then he didn't do a thing about it, except maybe, I guess he sent a few ships into the Black Sea after the fact.
Yeah, well, you see, if you notice, even Turkey, where I am now, the Turkish government, which has a convention with Russia and the other states at the border of the Black Sea, of course, was very reluctant to allow U.S. warships to enter Turkey as an ally of the United States.
But it has a responsibility to prevent warships entering the Black Sea under the Montreux Convention that could be engaged in military action.
And so there was a kind of standoff between Turkey and the United States before the Turks were reassured that the U.S. ships were just taking humanitarian aid and so on.
The Russians, of course, were very skeptical about that, about whether it was really humanitarian aid, but that's certainly the agreement between Turkey and the United States.
And that, in a sense, reveals this problem that if, whether it was in those days Dick Cheney and John McCain, or if now some people in the Obama administration, who may not have a big public profile but are influential in foreign policy, if they push these issues too far, many of the classic allies of the United States are worried that they could trigger a crisis, a conflict that they don't want, which could be fought on their territory, their next door to where the war will be.
And the same sort of thing applies to Iran.
The Turks don't want Iran to have nuclear weapons.
None of Iran's neighbors want it.
But they also recognize that if there's military action to prevent it, particularly if the military action is not decisive, that they will be the people who have to pay the price.
I'm sure you saw the BBC report, Horrors of KLA Prison Camps, revealed.
I was wondering if you could comment on that.
Well, I have to say, having been in Old Yugoslavia many times, including in Kosovo in 1999 and afterwards, the fact that the Kosovo Liberation Army was, shall we say, not quite as liberating as its name might suggest, was something that was very unpopular to say in 1999, that the Western media and Western governments were very anxious to portray Milosevic's government as being the embodiment of evil and therefore anybody against him must be a good thing.
But in practice, even before 1999, there was a lot of evidence that people who make up the KLA leadership were involved in violent acts, in car bombs, in assassination, including of Albanians, they didn't like, not just the Serbs.
And after they took over Kosovo in June of 1999 with the support of NATO, again, a lot of revenge and elimination of their opponents, Serbs, non-Serbs, but also of Albanians, they didn't like, took place.
And there was a kind of conspiracy of silence about this and much of the Western governments didn't want to talk about it because if you fought a war saying it was a war of good against evil and then you discover that some of the people on your side engage in ethnic cleansing, engage in murders and kidnappings and tit-for-tat killings in their own rivalries, then of course it's rather awkward.
So it doesn't surprise me, I suppose what I'm a bit depressed by is that it's taken 10 years for major Western news organizations really to investigate things which were quite evident already in July of 1999.
On the particular allegations, of course, there's always the problem that the more lurid the allegation, the more it attracts attention, it's not necessarily always the most authentic.
The basic problem, it seems to me, with Kosovo since NATO took over is that with the protection of our military forces, a group of people come to power who are involved in all sorts of criminal activities as well as political violence against their opponents and rivals.
All sorts of criminal activities that affect certainly people in Western Europe and in Eastern Europe.
So that, for instance, undoubtedly a huge amount of drug smuggling in Western Europe is facilitated through what is now an independent state with an independent diplomacy and so on.
Huge amounts of women trafficking, human trafficking is carried out.
And one of the things, again, back in 1999 you could already see outside Camp Bromsteel there were kind of lockups in which women from Moldova, which is a very poor country, where women were enticed to come to Kosovo thinking they were going to get a job, only to find that they were being basically kept as sex slaves to service the international community and the troops from NATO who were there.
And you could see outside Bromsteel, as I said, there were these kinds of buildings which were lockups which were actually awful to service the NATO troops.
So unfortunately NATO likes to present itself as an army fighting for these high ideals, but in reality you have a lot of young men in a foreign place and they are looking for certain things that various mafias are willing to provide.
The military bases around the world have had that relationship with sex clubs and brothels and so on throughout history.
But it slightly tarnishes the image that the West wanted to promote.
In those days President Clinton and Mrs. Albright, that they were bringing Western enlightened rational values.
So that they, for instance, required in the Kosovo Constitution that women should have equal rights and an equal share of the number of seats in Parliament.
Whereas at the same time, in reality, women were being grossly abused by the very people that we had brought to power, or at least some of the very people we had brought to power.
And so there's this terrible gap between much of the rhetoric which we've had really since the end of communism, whether it's promoting democracy in the market economy when very often we support petty dictators who were involved in actually skimming the pie for their own benefit, or you're talking about trying to promote women's rights when in fact you find that human trafficking is actually going on in the very places that we proclaim as being liberated.
One of the problems with my academic life, having visited too many of these places, you become very cynical and very jaundiced.
And I'm sorry if your listeners find it shocking.
Oh no, we're all very used to it.
I suspect a lot of them will have had the same experiences in many places themselves.
No one should allow themselves to be surprised.
Shocked is okay, but no one should allow themselves to be surprised by anything that national governments are doing around the world.
And particularly when you combine them together into these NATO forces and UN peacekeeping forces, they have this extra layer of distance from accountability.
And I think you see a lot more, for example, slavery like you were talking about among UN troops and NATO troops.
We have had reports, including by the UN itself, from Congo and so on, detailing these things.
So it's not by any means unique to Kosovo, but Kosovo is a particularly distasteful example, if I can put it that way, because of all the high flow rhetoric of liberation and bringing the highest values of the West.
And in practice, unfortunately, and many Kosovars, Albanians will admit this privately, it's a rather squalid place.
And one of the things about Kosovo, for instance, is very few people voted in the last elections because even if most Albanians would like to be, in some sense, independent, they don't really like or respect their politicians.
But they feel afraid to say it in public because people do get killed, have been killed.
And also, those who have been accused of these crimes, you mentioned the recent allegations by the BBC and the Balkan Research Insight Group.
But if we go back right the way to 1999, Ramush Haradina, who became Prime Minister of Kosovo, was involved in violent acts against Albanians.
And also, yet, at the Hague Tribunal, he was acquitted.
And the failure of the Hague Tribunal to convict people who have power and influence in Kosovo is one of the things that says to ordinary Albanians in Kosovo, as well as Serbs and the other minorities, these people have sufficient power.
Not only do they frighten us, they frighten the Europeans.
They frighten the judges in the Hague.
They frighten the Americans.
They know where they live.
And I think that's the alarming thing that we have a situation where, to some extent, the West seems very powerful.
The United States is a superpower, the only superpower in many ways.
But some of the agents of the West, some of the representatives in these international agencies, are themselves beholden to or intimidated by the local mafias and the local gangs that they deal with, often dressed up as liberation forces or politicians.
And that's the really corrosive thing.
It's bad enough that our states behave in a ruthless and high-handed way with a lot of frequently hypocritical language about pursuing human rights and so on.
But when we discover that many of the politicians and the diplomats and the high representatives who use this language are themselves slightly in awe and afraid of some of the local gangsters that they deal with on the ground, you then have the problem that those people are perhaps beginning to pull the strings with the people who run us.
And in Europe, I think that's the problem.
I don't have any idea whether it was ever the case that the Serbian regime in control of Kosovo was any less criminal, but at least then it wasn't my business.
But now that Camp Bonsteel is there and America has intervened in this civil war there, this is sort of an American protectorate from here on out, it seems like.
Well, that is absolutely the problem, isn't it?
Even if we accepted all the criticisms made of the Serbian state and we might be alarmed by those criticisms, we were not intimately involved in not supporting it.
Whereas now, whether we talk about Kosovo, talk about Afghanistan, for instance, we have this bizarre situation that in the year 2000, the supply of heroin from Afghanistan to Britain had virtually dried up because the Taliban, for whatever reasons, had clamped down on the opium production and the export of opium.
But the liberation of Afghanistan produced a tsunami of heroin into Europe.
And so to the average person in Britain, where after all, drug addiction is then linked to all sorts of petty crime and other crimes, the war in Afghanistan has actually made their lives more insecure, more dangerous, because you have many more heroin addicts, much more drugs on the streets, and all the crime that goes with that, and it's true of Germany and France, it's also true of Russia, but this is obviously the first country through which these things come.
And so a lot of the interventions that we've had in the last decade or so, which we are told are either for defending values of the West or for making us more secure, we can, I'm afraid sometimes, well, whatever the intention, the effect is not necessarily to do with Western values.
And in many ways, it has been to make ordinary people in Europe, anywhere who are affected directly by the criminalization of the places that we have liberated, make their lives much less secure.
All right, everybody, that's Mark Allman.
He's a lecturer in modern history at Oriel College, Oxford.
I couldn't have said that better myself.
He's the chair of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group, and he's on the phone today in Ankara, Turkey.
Thanks very much for your time on the show.
Thanks very much.