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[2] The destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodya by Hindu fanatics in 1992 and the demand for a Hindu temple at the site occupied more political attention than economic issues for many years. It is still a burning political issue. So is the massacre of 3,000 Moslem citizens in Gujarat in 2002 with the connivance of the local state government, which still remains unpunished.

Two Outstanding Experiments in Social Development

“You would like to know about China’s experience. ………………. Thus the primary thing we’ve learned from our experience and that we would like to propose to our third-world friends is self-reliance. Of course, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t seek outside help, but the main thing is to rely on our own efforts. Through self-reliance we can unite the people, inspire the whole country to work hard for prosperity, and thus make it easier to overcome the many difficulties in the way.”

Deng Xiaoping’s advice to Liberian head of state, Samuel Kanyan Doe, on 06 May, 1982, at a meeting in Beijing. Quoted from Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, Vol. 2, Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, China, 1995.

Ideological idiocy

In 1992 a man named Francis Fukuyama wrote a book titled The End of History and the Last Man. A US Department of State employee, he hailed the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1990/91 and proclaimed that Western liberal democracy represented the zenith of political evolution and was the ultimate state for mankind. He was not a pioneer. Many others before him, including Marxists and Soviet Communists, have made similar claims. He will not be last.

But the progress of human civilization has been due to man’s unique capacity to experiment, innovate and make choices for his betterment. No scientist believes that extant knowledge provides the final answer and hence continuous research and experimentation has enabled us to achieve our present level of development. Yet in two important areas of life, politics and religion, large portions of mankind are stuck in ideological grooves invented a few hundred or a few thousand years ago.

Capitalists, communists, socialists, conservatives, liberals, leftists, rightists, centrists, all of these under the umbrella of the holy grail of democracy and progress – these commonly bandied terms usually represent the political junk popularised by conniving politicians and their supporting media in their quest for power. They have different meanings for different occasions. For example, American democracy and British or French democracy widely differ and work differently. A US legislature influenced by 37,000 highly paid lobbyists for powerful special interests (largely big corporations) offering campaign finance and other incentives would not be considered part of a democratic system either in Europe or even in many developing nations.

When one billion people around the world live in dire poverty and even 13% of Americans are poor[1]  and often hungry and 50 million Americans are without access to health care[2], the world could not have invented an ideal socio-economic model as yet. This is why it is important to publicise any successful large-scale projects in socio-economic engineering outside of the mainstream systems that the international media pays scant attention to. I want to draw attention to two such outstanding experiments, one in India and the other in China. Both are brainchildren of two revolutionary figures.

An Indian experiment

India began its new experiment in living when Mahatma Gandhi’s concept of simple rural living and high thinking caught the imagination of Indians in their struggle for independence against British imperialists. Gandhi’s ritual cotton spinning and handloom cloth and disdain for imported manufactured products caught the imagination of the Indian masses and mobilised them into mass action. Bur a modern society cannot be sustained by primitive cottage industries. Pragmatic Indian Congress leaders recognised that it was not a panacea for India’s terrible poverty and they created the basis for a new industrial society after Gandhi passed away. But India remained, and still remains, a deeply divided nation, with state of the art industries and some of the world’s richest people together with 300 million of the world’s poorest people, mainly small farmers living in a semi-feudal rural society. It shows that market-based capitalism without a concern of the under-privileged is seriously flawed and hence the endless conflicts within Indian society.  

The most successful large-scale experiment in empowering poor small farmers, who constitute the largest portion of Indian society, began in 1946 in a small village called Anand in Gujarat. Dr. Verghese Kurien, a young government engineer, was sent to this place to work on a government project but became more involved in helping the poor local farmers struggling for survival on small plots of land with a few head of cattle. He gave up his prized job and organised a dairy cooperative which comprised dairy farmers in and around Anand called the Gujarat Farmer’s Cooperative Union. The success of the cooperative in Anand was replicated in other neighbouring villages in Gujarat and today this alliance of cooperatives has become the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation, which encompasses a shareholding by 2.8 million small dairy producers in Gujarat, India. It has become the leading Indian dairy products corporation with a current annual turnover of US$1.8 billion. Its Amul brand dairy products are distributed throughout India and also exported to some countries.

I visited the facilities in Anand and Dr. Kurien joining a group from the Indian Institute of Management of Ahmedabad in 1987 and again in 1988. Dr. Kurien and his wife, who prepared an excellent Indian lunch for us, lived in a comfortable modern house. To the Indian members of our team visiting the place for the first time, improving the lives of the poor was indelibly associated with Gandhi and his philosophy of life. So they questioned whether he was a vegetarian and teetotaller: to which he replied that he enjoyed his whisky and meat. He then made it plain that the success of the cooperative was due to its modern industrial technologies and highly paid professional management combined with equal shareholding for all dairy-farming members.

We visited the large modern factories in Anand. Milk collection vans went out daily to the rural households with a few cows to obtain small volumes of fresh milk. These were first tested for fat content and accepted. Payment was made for each collection the next day. The cooperative also provided the farmers with veterinary services, feed supplements and better breeding stock. In the factories, milk was sterilized, refrigerated and pumped from large overhead silos into railway tankers which set out daily for the big urban markets in Delhi, Kolkatta and Bombay. In other plants, milk was converted to butter, cheese and yoghurt and packed under the Amul name. There was a substantial allocation for marketing: market research, product distribution, packaging, media advertising and pricing. Like any modern industrial corporation, the business was working with food distributors, market research firms, advertisers and other national service providers.

Part of the corporate philosophy was also to provide low cost products for poor consumers. Low priced milk was sold in a unique way by eliminating packaging. Chilled milk dispensers were set up in stores in low income areas where consumers could bring their own containers and buy the quantity of milk they could afford. The milk vending machines were operated by consumers using token coins they could buy from the store.

China and “The World’s Richest Village”

The other remarkable new experiment in cooperative living comes from China. Prior to 1949, China was nominally governed by the rapacious Kuomintang regime of Chiang Kai-shek, while large swathes of this vast country was controlled by warlords paying nominal allegiance to the central government. The Chinese communist revolution set out to create a new egalitarian communist society but Mao Zedong’s authoritarian rule and increasingly eccentric mind created two of the world’s worst socio-economic experiments – the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution – in which millions of people died of starvation or were tortured to death through hard labour and physical punishment. Sanity and progress came only after Mao’s death in 1976. These were two of the worst ideologically based experiments in human history because the scale of it involved several hundred million people. Since then China has seen the world’s fastest economic growth and social development but market-based capitalism has produced the traditional ills of capitalism with the growing divide between the rich and the poor.

So the story of Huaxi, or “The Richest Village in the World”, is something that needs to be studied by economists and sociologists. The media published it in passing as a sensational story but it remains largely unknown to the world at large[3]. The story of Huaxi village begins in the 1990s when it was a very poor farming village with dirt roads and bamboo and wattle houses. With Deng Xiaoping’s market-based economic reforms and more open government, the local Communist Party leader, Wu Ren Bao[4], created a corporation in which all the local villagers became shareholders and set out to modernise its agriculture. The profits generated by the corporation were then used to invest in modern manufacturing units, mainly textiles and then steel. Steel manufacture and export, based on the import of raw material from India and Brazil, now accounts for half the business of this corporation.

Huaxi is not just another cooperative like the thousands that are found in Europe and America. Nor is it akin to the small communes sometimes found in the US where idealistic people who have opted out of the mainstream live simple lives with basic amenities. It is a new experiment in living designed for a comfortable modern life in an egalitarian society. The corporation is governed by a rigid moral code and work ethic. From the huge profits the business generated, the shareholders receive good salaries and substantial benefits. Villa-type house have now been built for all members. They are furnished with all mod-cons. Each family is entitled to a car at corporate expense: and the cars are usually luxury vehicles like Mercedes, BMW and Cadillac. Each family has a bank account with an average $250,000 in savings. They have free education and free health services. The village has good roads, landscaped open areas, good schools and hospitals, and museums and monuments symbolic of other countries which locals still cannot visit. Huaxi village allows non-residents to set up business in the locality but they have no access to the special benefits the members of the corporation obtain.

These benefits come with a strict moral code of conduct: no picking of any public property, no littering, and a 7 seven day work week with no holiday week-ends. A worker may obtain leave for a special occasion for a day. Morale is kept high with socialist propaganda. Inspirational songs are publicly broadcast praising communism and the covered walkways for pedestrians are lined with Confucian and other Chinese philosophic quotations.

Huaxi is not a passing phenomenon. Its success is mind-boggling. The annual turnover of this village corporation is now over US$70 billion. The corporation was quoted in the Shanghai Stock Exchange since 1995. It is a powerful corporation run on the best business practices and high moral principles for the good of its 36,000 members. With expanding manufacturing and the new business investments by outside investors that have flowed in, the village now employs another 60,000 or more migrant workers who do not share the same benefits, except for access to public education and health services. It is perhaps the most unique socio-economic experiment in modern history.

Kenneth Abeywickrama

30 December 2010.

[2] Report by Kaiser Foundation

[3] See

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12005026

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yru1C-RE7lc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFWQ0uTHdxc

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSPEK28591120071122

[4] Wu was a revolutionary and non-conformist. He was tortured during the Cultural Revolution as a “Capitalist Roader” and later criticized seeking private ownership of land by farmers.

Author with Dr. Kurien in his house in 1989 

Section of milk packing plant in Anand in 1989 

Dr. Kurien in his office in Anand in Aug 1989

Sierra Leone: An African Tragedy

Diamonds have brought out sometimes the best and more often the worst in Man. This illustrates the history of Sierra Leone in recent decades. Sierra Leone (literally, the Lion Mountain, area 71,740 sq. km, population 4.75 million as per 1995 estimate), is physically extraordinarily beautiful, politically chaotic, and the mass of the people are desperate for survival. The lush tropical vegetation, fertile soils and the plentiful mineral and water resources would have made this country a paradise under normal circumstances. But according to the Annual UN Human Development Reports, Sierra Leone is the worst country in the world for people to live in. But that doesn’t tell the real story of how this came about and what role outsiders have played in this tragedy.

Our small team of UNIDO consultants arrived by different flights into Freetown on 29 March 1996, on the very day that His Excellency Ahmad Tejan Kabbah was inaugurated as President of Sierra Leone in the hope of ending a long period of chaos and lack of governing authority and establishing some form of legitimate elected government. It was evident on landing in the tiny airport that this was not a holiday destination. The airport exit was thronged with ill-clad young men who aggressively confronted passengers and offered to lead them to the city about 25 miles away across a lagoon. Since there were no information, tourist or taxi booths as in other airports, we submitted to a gang of four who had already seized our bags and led us to a battered car which transported us to a jetty from where an ancient ferry, that had seen grander days in Britain half a century ago, carried us twenty miles across a lagoon to the city of Freetown. I must admit that our four guides solicitously protected our baggage and then led us to a taxi to get to the hotel and were pleased with the payment offered.

Sierra Leone was not a governable country and the writ of the government did not extend beyond the capital city at the time and even this was often a nominal authority. The curse of diamonds compounded the misery of this unfortunate country: lots of diamonds that could be obtained in many places by crude surface mining methods. Breakaway sections of the army and other lawless groups occupied these regions to mine for diamonds, while South African diamond dealers arrived in bush planes to buy these. The fortunes made from these financed weapons and armies to sideline or even take over the government at the centre. Much of the countryside was controlled by the Revolutionary United Front at the time, the ragtag army of bandits led by ex-army corporal, Foday Sankoh, who was allied to the equally obnoxious Charles Taylor who ruled neighbouring Liberia. These terrorist groups committed unspeakable cruelties against local villagers, killing and destroying villages, and cutting off the limbs of young people and even children, to terrify people to submission to their authority.

Tribalism

 Sierra Leone was a very troubled nation which has seen a succession of military coups and civil wars, interspersed occasionally with elected governments, ever since the British granted self-government to the colony in Freetown and the larger protectorate surrounding it in 1961. Its people could hardly remember a period of prolonged peace and development. As was the pattern in Africa, this artificial nation was created by the British who established Freetown in 1787 as a settlement for freed slaves and then extended their control over the surrounding region by making it a protectorate which was ruled regionally by the local tribal chiefs. So it became a nation of 18 tribes, of whom the biggest are the Temne and the Mende, and a smaller population of Krio elites in Freetown, the descendants of the liberated British slaves from the West Indies. By a strange twist of circumstances, the descendents of slaves from the West had become a superior social class to the descendents of free people in their own country.

However, apart from the Christian missionaries who founded good schools that created a small elite professional class, chiefly from among the Krio, the British government did little to improve the condition of the local population or develop its economy beyond creating the basis for British commercial enterprises exporting diamonds, bauxite, rutile, gold, cocoa and coffee. One great testament to the work of the Christian Missionary Society of Britain is the Fourah Bay College, founded in 1827, the oldest western-style university in West Africa.

Tribalism is the basis of much of the social mores and woes of an African state. Tribal settlements do not always fit into clear geographical boundaries and tribal customs do not conform to modern cultural practices. Propagandists for traditional culture throughout Africa loudly praise the security offered by the tribe to its members but this kind of primitive organization does not mesh with the requirements of a modern society and the tensions caused by tribal loyalties is a major cause of the perpetual conflict and bloodshed in Africa. Lands in Sierra Leone, outside the capital Freetown, are legally owned by tribal chiefs and these are not marketable. People wanting land for business or farming must lease it from the chief, unless they have sufficient military might to seize it by force.

We had an insight into the nature of tribalism when we visited the small national museum in Freetown. Such cultural institutions had been officially neglected by governments after the British left but this museum was being maintained because of the dedication and resourcefulness of an elderly South African woman who was its director. She was a small and frail woman of great scholarship in local lore who had made this country her home. Finding an interested audience in us, she personally guided us through the museum. Most of the exhibits were frightful looking tribal costumes used on ceremonial occasions. She told us that all her staff belonged to some tribe. Each tribal group had its own secret societies and had their initiation ceremonies, separately for men and women. These were so secret that they would not reveal these even to her for fear of violent reprisals. But it was known that these ceremonies involved living together for several weeks in the jungles where elders dressed in fearsome costumes and masks taught them ancient social practices and guidelines for survival through ritual dances, songs and forms of physical torture and mutilation.

 In-house bandits

The UN Chief Security Officer was the first to meet us at the Hotel Bintumani. He warned us that rebel attacks on the city were a possibility we had to take account of. In such an eventuality we should all gather in the adjoining beach from where arrangements would be made to airlift UN staff out of the country. There was plenty of evidence of the pervasive chaos in that corner of the world: there were about 50 UN staffers who were brought for their safety from neighbouring Liberia and housed in the hotel next to ours. Part of our work plan involved visiting two interior cities: Bo and Magburaka. He advised us against such visits to the interior: bandits not only robbed travellers, they had no compunction against killing foreigners.

With all these precautions, we were still ill-prepared for our own in-house bandits. Because of the unstable conditions in the country, our UN agency decided to send our living allowances and project expenses (which I, as Team Leader, would allocate) through the local UNDP office instead of crediting our bank accounts. So on the first working day our team gathered at the local UN offices at Siaka Stevens Street and met the Programme Officer, whose job was to look after the welfare of UN personnel working on UN projects. In the UN hierarchy, he is but a lowly clerk but that was not how he presented himself to us. The cash was in his hands and we were the recipients and that is the advantage this man wanted to demonstrate. In a quite unfriendly manner he asked us to come the next day.

We came the next day. Having worked quite often in Africa, I could read his signals but we agreed that bribing UNDP staff to get our dues was too outrageous. The next day, after some further delay, we were sent to the Accountant who was also always too busy. By the end of the day, checks were issued to us together with what seemed good advice. Since the security situation in the country was bad, we should not keep large sums of cash in the hotel. He gave us letters of recommendation addressed to the local Commercial Bank and told us to open accounts in the bank for safety.

Opening new accounts was easy. It was a large bank in a large building. A pleasant young lady in the bank opened our new accounts with alacrity and gave us check books. Whenever we visited the bank, either for deposits or withdrawals, this helpful clerk would come rushing from her desk to help us. At the end of the month, after making a new deposit, I sought a statement of the account. She went away and came back to state that the computers were not working and a statement could not be printed. This raised a red flag. I came back the next day with my colleagues and we asked for our bank statements. Again the smiles and the friendliness, and another excuse came out as to why such a statement could not be produced. I had learnt the name of the British General Manager of the bank and told her (quite untruthfully) that he was a friend and I would go up to his office and get the statements. At this, the clerk went back and came a little later with the statements. Glancing through the statements, we noted that each of us had been recorded for three or four cash withdrawals amounting to about US$600 of which we had no knowledge. Again we brandished the name of the General Manager and said we would meet him and draw his attention to the errors. At this the lady rushed back and came with a set of corrected statements. We promptly asked for the closure of our accounts. It was safer to keep the monies on our person than trust it to a Sierra Leone bank.

That was not the end of our woes with the UNDP office. We needed and car and a chauffeur for our work. Money had been sent for these purposes and again we went to the UN Programme Officer for his assistance. He was now much more cooperative. He promised to arrange a car by the next day. The next day he said we were lucky he was able to obtain the vehicle we needed at a cost of only US$60 a day. But when we went back to our offices at the Ministry of Industry, our helpful liaison officer, Joseph W.A. Jackson, was outraged. He said that it was double the going price for a hired vehicle. He would produce a dozen people who would provide a better rate. By evening we had a dozen car owners bidding for our business for US$25-30 per day. I chose one who had a fairly new Mercedes for US$30 per day.

We went back the next day to tell the Programme Officer that we had located a car for half the cost. His newly acquired friendly demeanour soured and he told us abruptly: “If you think you got a good deal, take it.” We took the driver and his service was excellent. After the first week, I gave him the invoice to collect his fee from the Programme Officer. He came back and told us that the Officer had abused him and chased him away. This was becoming complicated. We sent him again the next day with our request that he be paid. He came back to say that he was not going to be paid and therefore he could not afford to work for us. So we went back to the Programme Officer. He triumphantly told us that such things had to be organised with his guidance as we were foreigners. We would have our car and it would cost US$60 per day. There was no point fighting the system. We had our own work to complete on a tight schedule. There was no higher authority that would listen to our complaints, even if we could meet the local UN Resident Representative who was never in his office when we tried to reach him.

The car was a large and very old Mercedes and the chauffeur was a stalwart fellow of imposing size. He proved to be a very decent companion. He claimed that his brother was the army commander and that he would be our driver and bodyguard. During week-ends, he took us sight-seeing and introduced us to a lovely private beach in a little village by the sea where the local village youth association catered to paying guests and provided fresh sea food grilled in our presence in their beach huts. It was then that he told us: “Sir, don’t think I am paid $60 by the UN Programme Manager. I only get half the amount and he keeps the rest.”

The homeless and the Good Samaritans

While the international community, which comprises the power elite of the West, invaded and bombarded Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan, with and without UN approval, it sought to ignore the far greater tragedies in Africa in Ruwanda, Congo, Sierra Leone and other African states when it was most needed. Instead, it sent its favoured therapists, the Western NGOs and their aid agencies. Freetown, a small city of half a million people, was now bursting at the seams with one million refugees escaping from the horrors of the countryside. Every family I came to know in the city had around two dozen relatives who had fled their homes in the countryside.

Hundreds of displaced young men slept on the beaches at night. A morning walk on the beach near the hotel was not recommended. During the first few days, before we became wiser, a morning walk on the beach drew swarms of ragged young men demanding money, screaming “Pappy, Pappy, give money, give money.” It was wise to carry some loose cash to avoid being beaten up. It was wiser to avoid the beach altogether. Young girls dressed in tight black lace sequinned dresses roamed the streets near Hotel Bintumani where we stayed and accosted hotel guests who came out. We usually took a car to get to the excellent Lebanese restaurants by the lagoon where we usually dined but one evening my Indian Sikh colleague (always wearing his turban) suggested we walk there for the exercise. We brushed aside the women trying to accost us but two drunken women were determined to get us. They refused to leave us and when we started jogging to outrun them, they continued running behind us screaming “Bombay Man, Bombay Man, I love you!” As we neared the restaurant, the waiters who saw our plight came out with broomsticks to chase the women away.

Sierra Leone was a dying society and was attracting the usual vultures. While the homeless refugees suffered, the three tourist hotels by the beach were fully occupied by foreigners from Western NGOs, aid agencies, diamond buyers, and others looking for fortunes or for trouble. Quite a number of the men were comforting attractive young refugee women with real love by lodging them in their hotel rooms, sometimes with little children. It was difficult to find out what these people were doing to save the refugees. One new foreign business investment was hugely successful. Young adventurers from Europe had set up shabby night clubs beside the beach road in makeshift buildings. By nightfall these were blaring loud music and crowded with foreigners, UN peacekeepers and young women trying to earn a living.

President Tejan Kabbah’s government had recruited some of the best public officers I have met in Africa. Many of them had fled the country during the turmoil but returned determined to build their country. Abdul Thoru Bangura, the Minister of Trade/Industry & State Enterprises, and his Permanent Secretary, T.M. Kargbo, whom we worked with, were brilliant and sincere men. So was Steve Swaray, Governor of the Central Bank. Clearly, the government had to be empowered to get the public service working as the Treasury did not have the resources even to pay the public servants. This was the pre-requisite for investment and economic development. So the biggest of the Good Samaritans, the World Bank and the IMF, had arrived to guide the country.

The World Bank Privatisation Programme for Sierra Leone was the pre-condition for IMF financial assistance to this bankrupt state which was trying to get on its feet. Without external financial assistance this country had no hope of survival. The major source of tax revenue, diamonds, was lost as the rebel groups controlled the diamond fields and the two companies that had the contract to legally mine had left the country. The maintenance and improvement of the national infrastructure was essential for the business sector to create the jobs which would make for social stability. But none of this was possible unless the country was freed from the rebel groups which controlled over 90% of the country and made all life and work insecure. The Nigerian troops in the country to control the rebels were unable to complete this task (it was only done by UN and British forces in 2002).

After much haggling, the World Bank and the IMF committed to lend comparatively modest sums to tide over the period with the caveat: 42 major public enterprises, including utilities, must be privatized within a strict time schedule. To do this, the Bank funded the small Public Enterprise Reform and Divestiture Commission, as they did all over Africa and Asia.

Our team paid a courtesy call on the Resident Representative of the local IMF office, Mr. Salaheddine Khenissi. He was an aristocratic personality of Iranian origin with the languid manner of those born to ease and comfort. He graciously waved us to his elegantly furnished sitting area. A valet brought in cookies and tea in a silver tea service. His world of Oriental luxury was far removed from the surrounding country. We told him that our mission was to get the privatization programme moving again. It was simple, very simple, he said with insouciance. He took out a magazine article and gave it to us. He said it was authored by the son of Milton Friedman, the right-wing US ideologue, and it contained the simple answer. The business enterprises of these poor countries were of no interest to a good international investor. The solution was to combine all leading public business enterprises into one conglomerate and offer it to a single foreign (read Western) investor. The new owner would dismantle and sell off the assets of the failing businesses and use these resources to develop the few viable ones. We left after thanking him for his valuable insights and his paper.

The Bank reform proposals envisaged the sales of public enterprises to Western corporations and Investment Seminars were arranged in London and Frankfurt. But there were no takers and, hence, there were no privatizations. Then the IMF tranches (as the instalment payments are called) stopped: No privatization, No loan money! That is when our team from the UN Industrial Development Organization was invited by the government to make a fresh proposal.

It was clear to us as rational people that no Western corporation would invest in such a war-torn and chaotic country. So to the annoyance of a World Bank team of experts, who clearly resented our presence, who were making their critical review report on the failures of the government from the comfort of their luxury hotel suites, we started a dialogue with local business people using the local Chamber of Commerce. Some of them were local, some were Lebanese, a few were South Asian, but all of them had a good track record of business success under trying conditions. One Ghanaian lady, Hanna Fola Thomas, was an outstanding business woman, owning 40 fishing trawlers, three oil tankers, a company making soap, a supermarket and other ventures[1]. These people indicated their readiness to buy the state enterprises, provided they were allowed to pay for the purchases in instalments over 6-10 years.

This became our key recommendation and caused immense enthusiasm within the government. The presentation of our report was held in the Central Bank auditorium and was attended by four senior cabinet ministers and the entire finance committee of the parliament. My presentation of one hour was shown on national TV throughout the day during the news hour. When I left the country the next day, I was a celebrity. At the airport, the Chief of Customs recognised me and loudly told his staff and others around him: “This gentleman is a true friend of Sierra Leone. We don’t need to check his bags.”

The story does not have a happy ending. The following year, 1997, the army overthrew the government and chaos reigned again. The ECOMOG troops, mainly the Nigerian peacekeepers, restored the government again in 1998. In 1999 the Liberian troops of Charles Taylor invaded Freetown and established Foday Sankoh, the terrorist leader. The ECOMOG troops again defeated the terrorists and captured Foday Sankoh. But instead of getting rid of the terrorists, the Western powers demanded peace with the terrorists and power sharing. Fodah Sanko became Vice-President and was given control of the diamond mines. In 2000 Foday Sanko and his terrorists again overthrew the government and occupied Freetown. In 2002 the terrorists were finally defeated by British and UN forces and Foday Sanko died in custody in 2003. Tejan Kabbah was re-elected president again in 2002 and 2004.

There is a moral to this story. No government should tolerate or compromise with terrorists on its own soil who wage war against the government and the civilian population with widespread brutality. Western powers are fond of demanding peace talks and compromises with terrorists in developing countries (Sri Lanka being a prime example) while they themselves are engaged in anti-terrorist wars half–way around the globe.

Kenneth Abeywickrama

18 December 2010.

The Reality of the Global Village

The origins

When an Indian, with British citizenship and permanent residence in the USA, Pico Iyer, published an article titled “The Global Village Finally Arrives” in the Time magazine of 02 December, 1993, he invented an expression that has gained common currency and widespread endorsement[1]. He emphasized that American living styles have affected the rest of the world as much as the rest of the world has influenced America. Many food habits, dress habits, sports, mass media, products used, etc., are commonly seen throughout the world and mass communication technology is accelerating the trend towards uniformity of life-styles. Mostly, this accelerating multi-cultural trend is for the good but he also perceptively notes in passing that it also leads to rivalries and conflicts. But the Global Village is much more than even the author imagined. The Global Village is in reality a macrocosm of the traditional Indian Village that has somehow survived for several thousand years with the core structure essentially unchanged.

When the Spanish and Portuguese embarked on long voyages to discover the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa and South and East Asia, the world would change forever. Pope Alexander VI[2] sanctified and blessed these adventures by his Papal Bull Inter Caetera of 04 May, 1493, allocating newly discovered lands west of Cape Verde Islands to Spain and east of it to Portugal. The wealth acquired by these two countries roused the envy of the rest of Western Europe and later Britain, France, Italy, Germany and even little Holland and Belgium joined the race for the acquisition of new lands: to conquer, subjugate their people and to extract their wealth.

Everywhere that Europeans landed, they were initially received with kindness and hospitality. This kindness was regarded as stupidity and soon Europeans had occupied most of the rest of the world either by conquest or guile. The initial capital generated by the dispossession of the natives in South America helped in part to fuel the Commercial and Industrial Revolutions that created Europe’s enormous economic, technological and military advantage over non-Europeans.

The Global Village is born

Thus was born a new power structure and the Europeans’ sense of superiority over other people of the world that prevail in different forms even today. This is the true birthing period of the Global Village. The social structure that evolved is typical of an Indian village, where power is held in the hands of the Brahmins and the wealthy landowners, while the mass of the other villagers are considered a lower caste who have to be treated as inferiors and do most of the labour in the village. The parallel goes deeper. The European colonialists in Asia, Africa and South America usually had a strict ban on inter-marriage with natives for fear their race would be contaminated. It was acceptable to have native mistresses and but it was never right to marry them. And a European woman should never be tainted by association with natives. These are the dictates of the caste system in an Indian village that accepts that the superiority of the upper castes and untouchability has been decreed by God[3]. Indians designed such a caste system about four millennia ago.

But we must concede that direct colonial rule disappeared in the latter part of the 20th C. and former European colonies are almost all independent, except those like Australia, New Zealand and the Americas where European settler colonies erased the natives and created new European lands. We now have the United Nations General Assembly, where all of 192 nations of the world are represented. The same is true of any Indian village which has the panchayat or village council where all households are members. But no one is fooled: major decisions at the panchayat are influenced by the rich Brahmins and landowners, who have the real power, not the peasants who are beholden to them or work for them. And the upper castes are very conservative and have little desire to change the status quo.

This is the accepted manner in which big international decision-making bodies like the UN, the World Bank, the IMF and other influential international agencies that decide on international matters in the name of international community really works[4]. The UN General Assembly has 192 member states but the talk here carries little weight on any important issue. Every member state knows that. The resolutions passed at the General Assembly are routinely bypassed (eg. Palestine, Kashmir, Cuba, etc.) by the Security Council which has the power to implement. The real decision-making power lies with the 5 permanent members of the Security Council with their veto rights and with the Club of G7 nations acting together to promote their own interests and agendas.

But what about international institutions that act as checks and balances: the International Courts of Justice, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN Human Rights Council and other controlling bodies. Well their counterparts also exist in the village: the police offices and other state agencies committed to the welfare of people. But who would believe that a Dalit could bring a charge of rape against a Brahmin or a Kshatriya, while a Dalit accused of rape or marriage to an upper caste person would be lynched while the police stood by. It is common good practice among UN agencies to focus their attention on the real or perceived misdemeanours of developing countries and ignore international violations and crimes by the superiors. If any other lower state had the temerity to challenge the system, they have NATO, the world’s most powerful military alliance, to put such a challenger in place.

Tradition will be enforced

The G7 includes Japan, a non-European nation, but the Japanese were designated “Honorary Whites” even by the former apartheid regime in South Africa. China is among the five permanent members of the Security Council by an accident of history. Since the Council was formed by the victors of World War 2, China had to be cultivated to gain its full support against the war with Japan. When the Chinese communists took power in 1949 China was thrown out of the UN and only re-entered it in 1974 due to the rapprochement by the Nixon-Kissinger team that visited Mao Zedong, mainly as a counter-weight to the Soviet Union.

Though China is a member of the Security Council, it is not in the inner circle that dominates it. The country itself is surrounded by NATO military bases and subject to incessant hostile media attacks that alert others that this non-European Asian country is becoming too rich too fast and may hurt the ruling power structure.

Pico Iyer and his admirers happily note that people all over the world now accept international cuisine and international life-styles but he forgets that there are one billion desperately poor in the world, according to the UN, living in developing countries, that have very little access to these advantages. We all know that the lower classes in Indian villages are desperately poor[5] while the landowning class is rich and have most of the mod cons. That we all accept as natural.

The Indian village has its untouchables, the lowest of the low, social pariahs who are scorned and isolated. Now the ruling caste of the world has designated their untouchables: Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Cuba. The list expands and contracts depending on how other nations are perceived: are they obedient to us as required by tradition or getting too smart for our liking? Colonel Gaddafi made his nation of Libya a pariah state but he has been partially rehabilitated. Similarly, Indian villagers at the lowest level have some degree of limited social mobility, if they have economically or professionally advanced, depending on their acceptance by the village upper castes.

Tradition must live

The great Indian leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Jawarharlal Nehru, who worked with Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar to outlaw caste discrimination even in the Indian Constitution, were unable to eradicate the ingrained social inequality in the traditional Indian village. Despite the current teachings that Globalization is creating equality among nations[6], this is only a shallow portrait and not the reality. Tradition is hard to alter

The conservatism of the upper caste both in the Global Village and the Indian Village remains the same. The caste system is rigid and even in a modern India remains strong. The Permanent Five of the Security Council were self-appointed leaders in 1944 but they never allowed change though the situation in 2010 is drastically different. Germany is the biggest economy in Europe but it is out of the Security Council while smaller fry like UK and France hold their place. Japan is even bigger, now running as the third largest economy after the USA and China, but it is still not among the select five who will not give up their old privileges. The powerful G7 group, despite issues of hierarchy, stick together as it would be unwise for them to rock the establishment where they have a common interest..

What a wonderful thing it is that an ancient Indian tradition is now accepted as universal law! However, there is a dark shadow in the sky. Indian Buddhist philosophy proclaimed: The only permanent feature of the universe is change. The Indian Village is very slowly but surely breaking down with the lower castes taking to education, business and politics. Economics is a great leveller. Even in India, Mayawati, a Dalit, became Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh State, India’s most populous state. And so it is in the Global Village. As China, India, Brazil and other developing countries become economically more and more powerful, the old traditions must unfortunately decline and disappear to create another world.

Kenneth Abeywickrama

27 November 2010

Copyrights reserved. Reproduction will be allowed with permission from the author.

The Chinese Threat to the USA

“I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

Thomas Jefferson, distinguished 3^rd President of the USA (1801-1809), principal author of the American Declaration of Independence, statesman, scholar, inventor, architect, archaeologist and horticulturalist.

The Western & Eastern perception

“Mao Crosses the Yangtse”. It was the biggest headline ever in the Ceylon Daily News on the 23 of August, 1949, and as a schoolboy in Sri Lanka, I read it with wonder and anticipation. The history of the world would never be the same again. A poor oppressed Asian people had defeated an authoritarian semi-feudal regime heavily backed by Western imperial powers – or so we believed in our black and white picture of the world. The Western world was in shock while the colonial or former colonial peoples of Asia overwhelmingly rejoiced. The Western imperial powers that had their own enclaves in Shanghai and other trading ports, with prominent notices in exclusive European suburbs and clubs which bore the sign – “Chinese & Dogs Not Allowed” – found it hard to forgive a Communist China for its impudence. The cry that resonates even now in the West is crudely simple: China is a threat to Western civilization, its democratic values and economic interests.  Would they now cross the Pacific Ocean, with long range nuclear missiles as in modern warfare, and attack the US, as many worried Americans fear and their mass media and politicians suggest?

Just last week the European powers in NATO invited Russia to sit down with them on security issues, after having rebuffed earlier Russian attempts to join them for almost two decades. European political leaders and commentators explained the reasons for this about turn in explicit terms on TV: The rapid rise of Asia in recent years, particularly China and India, posed a new potential threat to Europeans. The Russians must now be drawn in as Europeans to face this common threat. Up to now development and prosperity was said to be a win-win situation for everyone. That was when the West was expanding and Asia was mired in poverty. But the development and prosperity of resurgent Asia and the economic downturn in the West now turns this theory on its head!

While we in the West fear the rising Chinese economy[1], condemn its human rights shortcomings[2], imagine that it could be a military threat to US hegemony, little attention has been drawn to the dramatic social transformation that has taken place in China in the last half century. What took 500 years in Europe has been achieved in China in this past half century. We have the United Nations and World Bank statistics on its achievements in literacy and education, health, poverty alleviation, housing, sanitation, access to clean: all these are confirmed data while UN now says that China will probably be the only developing country to achieve all the UN’s Millennium Development Goals by 2015. These by themselves are also considered a threat to Western pre-eminence. The information available to most Americans, probably the least informed citizens of the world because of the quality of its mass media, makes many of them hysterical at the idea of a rising China.

Chinese experiments with government

During  the course of the 20^th century, the Chinese undertook four of the largest political/social/economic experiments in the history of mankind, within the umbrella of the Chinese Communist Party, involving hundred of millions of participants, and the economic and social ramifications of these resonated around the world: (1) The successful Chinese revolution which took over the country in 1949 after three decades of struggle; (2) The disastrous “Great Leap Forward”  of 1958-1962 to collectivize and industrialize which resulted in famine and failure; (3) The destructive “Cultural Revolution” of 1966-1976 to create a pure communist society; (4) The “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” propelled by Deng Xiaoping after 1978 which has made China the fastest growing economy in the world, now only behind the USA in GDP size. Two gigantic failures and two remarkable successes! Even the two tragic failures on a monumental scale were desperate experiments to leapfrog China from a primitive peasant economy to a modern industrial society by revolutionary leaders with little knowledge at the time of the workings of the world economy.

The military comparison

Does the Chinese government now want to threaten and dominate the rest of the world as most of us are led to believe by our own media and politicians in the West?

Take the issue of military expenditure. The official US expenditure is around $663[3] billion but with supplementary votes for ongoing wars and the physical cost of the war, which includes long-term medical expenses for wounded soldiers, the cost has been calculated at over dollars one trillion a year[4] with the ongoing wars in the Middle East. China is now estimated to spend $98.8 billion. It is less than one tenth the US expenditure with a Chinese population four times that of the USA and a huge land border. China does not maintain overseas bases[5] and has not, in present times, threatened other nations directly, or with the Bush doctrine of “Either you are with us or against us.” It has not invaded any other country since the creation of the Peoples Republic of China. On the other hand, the US and its NATO allies have invaded Vietnam, Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan and now threaten to attack Iran. The US, without declaring war, earlier on, bombed Sudan, Libya and Afghanistan. It is involved in a military show of force around the world, with 737 military bases in 63 foreign countries[6]. The Project for the New American Century[7] which advocated US military dominance of the world was a guiding influence for the Bush era wars of this century. One of the key objectives of this document was to “Deter the rise of a great-power competitor”. It identifies China and Russia as the main enemies of the US, among lesser others.

China came in support of North Korea in the Korean War of 1950-53. But this was because victorious US forces approached the Yalu River and General Douglas McArthur was proposing to his government that China should be invaded and even suggested dropping of nuclear bombs on China, proposals his own President Harry Truman rejected. The fledgling Chinese state had suffered enough from foreign intervention and was prepared to defend itself at a time when its military was still poorly equipped.

Chinese occupation of Tibet has been mired in disinformation. Tibet was a Chinese tributary in the past and the Tibetan Panchen Lama visited the Chinese Emperor personally on occasion, even though the journey each way took him over two years at that time. There is a palace built  in 1771 not far from the Imperial Summer Palace in Chengde, in imitation of the Potala Palace in Tibet, for the exclusive use of the visiting Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama. I personally visited this palace in 1994 when I was in that region on a UN project in neighbouring Mongolia. After the communist victory, the country feared foreign interference through the weak Tibetan government. Tibet was a feudal theocracy where a sizeable proportion of the people working for the biggest landowners, the Buddhist monasteries, as serfs. Hence the Chinese aimed for a total occupation of Tibet.

After the Chinese revolution, the government entered into negotiations with the government of Tibet for its incorporation within China. There were sections within the Tibetan government that favoured this. But negotiations failed and the Chinese Army crossed the Jinsh River border and occupied the Tibetan border town of Qamdo by use of force. The defeated Tibetan army commander, Ngabo, went to Lhasa to again present the Chinese proposals which were finally accepted after negotiations between the two governments several months later. Tibet agreed to be incorporated within the Peoples Republic of China though there were factions in the government that still disagreed. The Dalai Lama endorsed this agreement. Violent opposition to the Chinese government began only in 1956 in some parts of the country, after the introduction of land reform, led by some of the landowning monasteries. When serious violence spread to Lhasa in 1959, with the CIA providing the rebels with arms and training, the Chinese Army put it down equally violently. Though we may disagree on the use of force, it is undeniable that an oppressive primitive feudal society has been converted since into a modern society with many social and economic benefits for the Tibetan people.

The Taiwan issue is different and more complex. Taiwan was an independent island till it was occupied by the Dutch (1624-1664), Imperial Chinese (1664-1895), Japanese (1895-1945) and was handed back to China by the victors of World War 2 in 1945. In December 1949 the defeated Chiang Kai-shek established Taipei as the provisional capital of a China he no longer ruled. Reciprocally, China was then determined to bring Taiwan under its rule. After many overt military threats against Taiwan that failed, China seems to have realised that it is better to build good relations with economic ties and leave the question of sovereignty unresolved.

During the three early phases of the communist experiments noted here, China did put on a very aggressive posture towards the West which had even blocked its seat in the UN General Assembly till 1971. This was manifested in Chinese state propaganda (crude by modern standards) which referred to the US as a Paper Tiger and local dissidents and critics as Running Dogs of Capitalism. This was accompanied by films and drama depicting the victory of the Chinese Peoples Army over foreign enemies. These started to disappear after President Nixon’s historic visit in 1972 to China to meet with Chairman Mao Zedong and  Zou Enlai. But even as early as 1956 the Chinese government had begun to cultivate the Non-Aligned Movement’s developing nations with reciprocal high-level visits and aid projects[8]. Current Chinese propaganda, as shown in the Chinese media and its CCTV channels today, is very sophisticated and attempts to present balanced views in news reporting or analysis.

Chinese pragmatism versus US power politics

Since the introduction of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, or simply the introduction of a regulated capitalist market economy in China, China has focussed strongly on building a worldwide network of friendly nations. The official Chinese slogan to describe its foreign policy is Harmonious Development of the World. It does not seek domination but economic expansion. Using its vast external resources, which it would otherwise be holding while the value of the US dollar in which it is mostly denominated declines, it has become the major aid donor to most parts of Africa and some parts of Asia and South America. Chinese aid is generous and effective. It does not discriminate against countries because of their political system or their political alliances. In developing countries, Chinese aid is for vital infrastructure development, not for esoteric projects like building democracy or creating civil society. Chinese aid is also cost effective. It does not require lengthy pre-project studies by highly paid consultants and the hire of expensive services. The Chinese allocate a fund and build a project themselves and their costs can be as low as 20% of what it would have cost with Western contractors.

A US Congressional Research Service Study of 25 February 2009 begins:

“In the past several years, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has bolstered its diplomatic presence and garnered international goodwill through its financing of infrastructure and natural resource development projects, assistance in the carrying out of such projects, and large economic investments in many developing countries.”[9]

In my work in different countries in Africa, I have often heard locals say, “China is our best friend.” But China does not only cultivate developing countries. After the recent financial crisis in Greece, the visiting Chinese President indicated to Greece that they would help to stabilize Greece by buying up to US$50 billion of Greek government bonds when they are issued. Despite the constant criticism of China (human rights, currency manipulation, exploiting poor nations, causing environmental degradation) by the West and particularly US politicians and media, the Chinese refrain from criticising the West. The recent worldwide economic collapse, a Made in USA product, cost China 20 million jobs, and yet it refrains from pointing accusing fingers. Even the annual Human Rights Report of the State Department, which regularly excoriates China, rouses only a mild response with China putting out a modest document on US human rights violations. While criticising China, the US continues to borrow money from China, which is its biggest creditor nation.

It is easy to see who is winning this competition between the USA and China. While the US arrogantly demands compliance even from its NATO allies and threatens recalcitrant developing nations, the Chinese charm offensive backed by massive aid projects has helped it to win friends, gain new raw material sources and establish world-wide trade links.

This wide divergence of foreign policy strategies is due to one singular factor that has not been adequately discussed. The Government of China is organised like a hugely successful business corporation that operates the largest country on earth. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China is like the Board of Directors and the General Secretary, who is the President, is like the CEO. The shareholders, who are not directly paid dividends but are likely rise in public office, are the 80 million members of the Chinese Communist Party. It draws up national plans, strategies and implementation plans. Like any successful corporation, it has a clear vision for the future. It is highly focussed on national development. It has its rules of conduct to maintain strict order and discipline. The CEOs after Deng Xiaoping are highly-educated middle-aged technocrats, not any of the former octogenarian warriors of the Long March and the Revolutionary War. The CEO and board members are not greedily seeking bonuses and pay rises like US CEOs. They are focussed on long-term national development and their reward is their place in history.

The US government, on the other hand, operates like a dysfunctional democracy. Bitter party rivalry between the two contenders prevents either one from implementing sustainable programs most of the time. The effort is to win power at any cost, with hundreds of millions of campaign funds, hostile and often rude attack advertising. Even programs one party supports it opposes if it is proposed by the other. Additionally, lobbyists and massive corporate and special interest funding of legislators ensure that the common man’s interest is often sacrificed for the benefit of the privileged few. Corporate operated media usually entertains and ensures that ordinary Americans are more ignorant of foreign affairs and their own economy than their counterparts in European countries and other developed nations.

What of the future scenario? The USA has more resources and more high level expertise than any other country. It has attracted the best talent from around the world to maintain its leadership in technical research and development. It has the largest number of the world’s biggest corporations. But the system does not allow it to fully use its talents and resources. The country has now the highest national debt ($13.5 trillion), the highest real unemployment (17.5%) and a declining productivity. Millions have lost their homes and millions more will be losers in the coming years. Can it change the ways it is governed? Can it focus on national development without perpetual wars, now costing a trillion dollars a year?  China, on the other hand, has experimented with forms of government in four distinct phases of development. It will certainly keep on modifying and developing its system of government as the general population becomes more and more affluent and demanding. China has been willing to change while the Obama battle cry of Change We Can is lost in the wilderness of partisan politics.

Kenneth Abeywickrama

November 2010

[2] Human Rights has become the most potent weapon to attack developing countries that become too independent of the West. Control of the mass media and international institutions enables the West to pick and choose violators and cover up their own scandals.

[3] Base figures from http://www.globalsecurity.org  and Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

[4] Calculated by Nobel Prize-winning Economist Joseph Stieglitz, among others.

[5] “The String of Pearls” claim, because the Chinese built commercial ports in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Burma is a canard. It is much coming from the USA which has military bases in 63 countries and 255,065 military personnel overseas. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=5564

[6]  See http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12824. These are yet 2005 figures and the present number may be more.

[7]  See http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf . This misguided view that America can dominate the world by developing extraordinary military prowess has already devastated America’s image around the world and caused it to lose whatever moral authority it possessed.

[8] Between 1971-1973 China built a grandiose international conference centre in Colombo, Sri Lanka, as an outright gift. Shortly after, China built a massive flood protection system in southern Sri Lanka.

[9] See http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R40361.pdf

“Me Too” products, unfortunately, fail:

A Marketing Man’s Perspective on the US Elections

As a marketing professional and an international business consultant, I have often impressed on businessmen in developing countries that copying a current market leader does not create a successful new product. I was fond of parroting a basic in good in product development: Product differentiation is the basis of good marketing. This basic lesson was lost on our good President of the USA, a well-meaning and intelligent man floundering in the chaotic American political system who is seeing his former huge support base disappear from under his feet. Having convincingly won the election to office on the popular slogan of “Change We Can” he not only copied the opposition in many respects, but these fake goods were also sold at the same price. Imagine a customer faced with an imitation product being offered at the same price as an existing brand and you can guess his reaction. This is what happened to the Democratic Party during the recent elections for offering its supporters spurious products. They either ignored what was offered and stayed at home or opted for the genuine article.

The second marketing failure of the current administration was its poor communication skills. Even where it had solid achievements, like the Health Care Bill, It could not get the message across effectively. The opposition, on the other, understood they were dealing mostly with politically illiterate voters and ran colourful Road Shows (Tea Party, Sarah Palin) which played on the ignorance of the audience and relied on sound-bites without substance. For the most blatant example, they attributed the failure of the economy to the President’s “communism and socialism”, when it was unbridled capitalism run wild that caused the economic collapse under previous administrations. In fact, the two large surviving communist countries, China and Vietnam, have the highest rates of growth in the world in the last decades and were the least affected by the world economic downturn manufactured in the USA and exported abroad! But how would ordinary citizens in the Mid-West or the American South know so much? Of course, all politicians the world over know that the public have short memories. You can feed them with promises but after a few years these are forgotten or easily attributed to others.

The other popular misnomer, cleverly marketed by the corporate media and accepted by many citizens, is that the two opposing parties must collaborate and work together for the good of the country. This is the political principle that was advocated and carried out by Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Mao Zedong. The basis of the multi-party system that characterises a democracy is that opposing parties oppose each other, vigorously, by presenting differing agendas and canvassing for them, so that the citizens can choose the best option they see. The Republican Party understands this: the Democratic Party which represents a more heterogeneous group of people, does not. Opposing parties unite only in times of grave crisis, such as was the case in World War 2, where all parties are agreed on a common agenda.

Every American understands that America is in a grave crisis, though many are unaware of the nature of it, thanks to the entertainment-oriented mass media and evasive political manifestos: banks and financial giants collapsing, giant corporations failing, 17.5% of the working population unemployed or on part-time work, 9 million homes lost to foreclosure or debt, a national debt now reaching $13.5 trillion and rising, endless wars in the Middle East costing a trillion dollars a years, etc. But the Democrats try to make a virtue of the need to work with the other party, which was mostly responsible for the present failures, on the grounds that it is only through this cooperation that the country could be best served. What a weak-kneed way to carry out the revolutionary promise of “Change We Can”! Revolutions are carried by tough, ruthless and confident people who clearly articulate their goals and objectives like Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan and damn the opposition.

The current American crisis requires an analytical plan, on the model of a business plan that sets out the nature of the crisis, how it came about, the new goals and objectives, and a work plan with the achievable targets. The financial institutions that were gifted with trillions of dollars in bail-outs and underwriting of bad securities are not lending adequately to revive business but giving managers fat bonuses and creating profits through speculation and the stock market, mortgage lenders are throwing people out of homes without restructuring bad loans, corporations are down-sizing and sending jobs overseas. The new form of American capitalism based on financial speculation and short-term profits has failed the nation but no senior politician is willing to admit it. They consider it unpatriotic and un-American to say the system has failed and needs to be restructured to make capitalism work for the people and not for a few profiteers and gamblers. Without changing this structure there will be no respite for the nation. Mao Zedong famously said that “Power comes out of the barrel of a gun”: it might be equally said of America that “Power comes from the billions of dollars that buy the politicians”.

A search for an articulated program from the Democratic and Republican parties for the American voters was frustrating. The websites of both political parties, their media appearances and public speeches, are mostly full of sound-bites and empty rhetoric and appeals to patriotism[1] with an absence of substance. By late September, just before the elections, the Republican Party put out “The Pledge to America”[2]. It was not a document presented and discussed at grassroots level and finally approved by the highest level of the party as an approved plan of action. It was a hastily contrived document prepared for the election: undo the Health Care Reform Bill, keep the prison in Guantanamo Bay open, renew the Bush administration tax cuts but reduce the government spending by $100 billion a year, fund a new missile defence program, cancel future TARP payments, give small business a 20% tax deduction, have more sanctions on Iran, and so on. No analysis of the real problem or how these projects would work and what results they would produce.

The Democratic Party website is even more fascinating. Open the website and it asks you for your e-mail, name, address, and some other details and seeks donations under different levels ranging from $25 to $1,000 and over that limit. Packages were sent to party supporters on the eve of the elections with a questionnaire on the administration’s achievements and, of course, requests for donations. But they were all the wrong questions, intended only to seek endorsement for the administration. It was a poor promotion and it produced poor results. The great presidential election promises were forgotten: setting a time-table to end the ever-lasting Middle East Wars, helping struggling homeowners with their mortgages, providing universal health care, giving jobs to Americans without outsourcing them abroad[3], etc. However, even these did not address the real issues.

America is facing its deepest crisis since World War 2. The average citizen who is not in the millionaire/billionaire class knows it when he sees jobs evaporating, investments and homes being lost, social services reduced and higher education put beyond the reach of the middle class. The people are desperate for quick solutions. Most of Europe, except for Ireland, Spain, Greece and the UK, has managed to partially move out of recession, while Australia has been even more successful. The developing countries of East and South Asia and South America are seeing strong growth and are showing their muscle in the international arena. But the politicians running America don’t even want to talk about the core issues, leave aside planning to overcome them. The founding fathers of the United States, perhaps the greatest single body of intellectuals, politicians and statesmen in modern history, must be turning in their graves viewing the current state of the nation they created.

Kenneth Abeywickrama

07 November 2010

[2]  See http://www.gop.gov/resources/library/documents/solutions/a-pledge-to-america.pdf

[3] The popular myth is that jobs go to Asia because of low wages. However, Germany is the second largest exporter in the world, and German labour cost almost double the US.

Albania, the Maverick of Europe

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

Charles Darwin (1809-1882), author of On the Origin of Species.

The Albanians

From Vienna, a small plane takes you to Tirana and a chaotic little airport which might be in some obscure little Third World country. People are milling around and pushing towards the two immigration counters while welcoming friends and relatives are doing the same from the other side of the little hall. Armed soldiers stand beside the immigration officers watching passengers queuing up for entry. Luggage is brought in and pushed manually by workers into an enclosed space near the exit: there are no conveyor belts to move passenger luggage as in any other international airport. No Customs officers are in sight. Retrieving bags seemed a problem in the melee but the offer of two dollars to a stout baggage woman in a white dress ensured that these were picked up and brought to the pavement outside where UN a car was waiting for us. It was early May, 2000.

Albania is the poorest country in Europe. But the Albanians cope, some rather well, because they have the strongest survival skills to live in their difficult modern world. Looking from my twelfth floor window in the Tirana International Hotel, overlooking Skanderbeg Square, which is the very heart of the city, one could easily get the wrong impression. Down below, there is a never ending stream of cars going past, many of them luxury vehicles like BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi. A fairly new luxury vehicle can be purchased at a bargain price for, as everyone knows, almost all the cars, except for those owned by foreign agencies, have been stolen in Western Europe and smuggled in through agents in Macedonia with counterfeit documents. Albania comes first in one area of professional expertise: it has the deadliest criminal gangs in Europe.

The Albanians claim descent from a very ancient European people, the Illyrians, who were living in the Eastern Mediterranean over a several thousand years before Christ and traces of their language are still a part of the Albanian language. But living in the cross-roads, in the path of emerging military powers, has not given Albania a peaceful history. First invaded by Macedonian Greeks and then by Romans, who both contributed to moulding the Albanian language and culture, the Roman rule of six centuries from the 3^rd Century B.C. to the 4^th Century A.D. was the only long period of relative peace and prosperity under pax Romana. The ruins of Roman amphitheatres and buildings are still seen near the major towns. With the decay of the Western Roman Empire, Albanian lands were also invaded by the so-called barbarian tribes that attacked Rome: the European Goths and the Central Asiatic Huns. With the split in the Roman Empire, Albanian lands became a part of the Eastern Roman Byzantine Empire.

With the Byzantine Empire in decline in the 13-14^th centuries, Albanian lands were invaded by other warring people: the Avars, the Serbs, the Croats, Bulgars, Venetians and Normans. From the late 14^th Century, the Ottoman Turks swept through the Balkans and Albanian lands were incorporated in the Ottoman Empire, a rule which lasted till the early 20th century. The proudest moment of Albanian history was when Skanderbeg Gjergj Kastrioti united some of the tribes and established an independent Albanian state in the middle of the 15^th century (1443-1506 A,D.), for a brief period of 35 years, defying Ottoman armies.

 Ottoman rule in turn influenced the culture of Albanians. Around 70% were converted to Islam, primarily to evade the taxes that were imposed on Christians. The Islamic tradition of hospitality towards strangers is still strong among ordinary Albanian people and some of the Islamic customs associated with Id still appear during the month of fasting, though Albanians today have little interest in the practice of religion. During the month of Ramadan, drummers with large drums and gaudy costumes and conical hats (resembling more like those of clowns in a circus), pause at vantage points in the streets of Tirana to announce with drumbeats the times for the fast to begin and to end.

Political history

Internecine warring based on tribal loyalties ensured that the Albanians would never have a separate nation till the European powers proclaimed Albania as a nation state in 1913 as part of the dismemberment of the moribund Ottoman Empire. Despite independence from Ottoman rule, Albania remained a barely governable nation with quarrelling landowning aristocrats and interfering neighbouring states. The final vestige of independence was lost when Mussolini’s Italy occupied Albania in 1939 as a stepping stone for the invasion of Greece. Italian withdrawal from the Second World War was followed by a period of rule by Nazi Germany. The Italians built the large main square in Tirana and the broad avenue leading from it through the centre of the city and the large public buildings which still house the main government offices. Nothing comparable has been built since then.

Little credit is given today to the eccentric communist dictator, Enver Hoxha[1], for transforming Albania from a medieval feudal society into an independent modern state. School teacher turned partisan leader, he collaborated with the other legendary partisan hero, Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, to organise the war against the Germans and finally led his ragtag army into Tirana to take over as the undisputed leader of the country. An unabashed admirer of Joseph Stalin, his land reforms destroyed the powerful landowning aristocracy and with successive assistance from Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and finally the Peoples’ Republic of China, he created an industrial base in a few decades. Each of these alliances was dumped when Enver Hoxha felt that his benefactors were betraying the true communist ideology in favour of comprises. Through ideological propaganda, strict regimentation of the entire population, and the uncompromising pursuit of the goal of a modern society, the communist government established universal education, health services and guaranteed employment. For the first time in its history, tribal conflicts and blood feuds were eliminated and women genuinely achieved equal rights with men. In retrospect, this temporary cathartic experience, lasting from 1945 till Hoxha’s death in 1985, seems worth the egregious restrictions on political freedoms and hardships that were imposed by the one-party state. For the first time, a truly Albanian nation state was created.

It is today the vogue to focus on Enver Hoxha’s eccentricities and phobia’s. The country was and is still littered with hundreds of thousands of small igloo-shaped concrete pill-boxes where soldiers could presumably hold out against a potential enemy invasion. Roads were narrow and ended sharply at right-angled corners to prevent the landing of enemy aircraft. All able-bodied men and women, including teenage school-children, received rigorous military training.  Personal travel was severely restricted and permits were required to travel from one region to another. Religious worship in public was banned. A vigilant and ideologically biased police kept a strict watch over anti-socialist and anti-social activity.

But Enver Hoxha was definitely not your typical Third World dictator who raided public funds to create private multi-million dollar Swiss bank accounts, installed friends and relatives in all the high positions and impoverished the country while enjoying the good life. He was a committed ideologue and selfless patriot though he suffered from the paranoia that the whole world was plotting against his country. His small President’s House is still seen in Tirana and is no bigger than an ordinary middle-class house in any European country and he lived a Spartan life for a head of state. The world of his era was at the height of the Cold War and he did not want the independence of his country compromised by any super-power. To create this independence Albania withdrew from the international community and tried to be self-sufficient. The whole nation was mobilised for development projects. School-children were mobilised as Young Pioneers and were involved in national projects. The state built factories, power plants and collective farms to achieve full employment and provide free schooling and health services. Classical arts like music, opera and the theatre were widespread and appreciated by the ordinary working class in a manner not seen in any of the developed Western societies. The Albanians we saw were a healthy and well-educated people when we met them even in the year 2000.

During its long and troubled past history as a colony of foreign powers, Albanians showed their genius for survival by either fleeing their native lands or by joining the armies or administrations of the imperial powers. No less than 6 Roman emperors were of Illyrian origin (Decius, Claudius Gothicus, Aurelian, Probus, Diocletian and Constantine the Great) and 40 Ottoman Grand Viziers or Prime Ministers were of Albanian origin. This instinct for survival still dominates Albanian society in its present time. There are over 10 million Albanians outside Albania compared to the 3.5 million within its boundaries.

The liberation of Albania from communist rule follows the pattern enacted throughout Eastern Europe in the 1990/91 period, but its harmful consequences were more evident in Albania than elsewhere. The “velvet revolutions” were organised by urban students and the higher-level professionals and skilled workers who resented the restrictions on their personal freedoms and were seduced by Western propaganda. These were revolutions organised by minorities against dispirited communist governments that had already seen the Soviet Communist Party voluntarily relinquish power and withdraw itself into the Russian state.

Current politics

After the death of Hoxha in 1985, his successor, Ramiz Aliya, began a movement towards liberalising the regimented and restrictive society: free market reforms, freedom of travel, religious freedom and, in 1990, even alternative political parties. But governments were falling throughout communist Eastern Europe like dominoes. People who had been isolated from the world for many decades were now converted to the messianic view that free market international capitalism was the ultimate guarantee of human happiness. The dream world of American soap operas like Dallas, The Bold and the Beautiful, Another World, took on an uncanny reality in these simple minds. When the government abdicated in the face of public demonstrations, mobs went around destroying many productive economic assets of the country, convinced that in a capitalist society people did not have to work but simply enjoyed the good life. It is estimated that in the collective farms over 200,000 olive trees were cut down and we saw machinery in large factories that were smashed with sledge hammers. There is local evidence that Western espionage agencies funded the protests to hasten the demise of communism in Europe through various local front organisations.

The liberation of the population from rigid state control was too rapid a transition for a people who had no living experience of making their own rational choices. It was a situation where everyone was for himself or herself. The country was ungovernable though new government institutions in imitation of democratic societies were put in place. From an extremely organised society that controlled and guided every person, Albania became a maverick society without rules.

The multi-party elections of 1992 brought into power the anti-communist Democratic Party headed by Sali Berisha to the delight of Western powers that hailed the rise of another parliamentary democracy in a former totalitarian communist state. Privatization was the key to political reform advocated by Western economic advisors and aid agencies. The country’s state-owned business assets were speedily taken over by corrupt politicians and their cronies to create the new dominant class of gangster capitalists. The GDP of the country fell by half, government coffers were emptied and the social safety network created earlier collapsed. It was an enactment of what happened in Russia on a much smaller stage.

Disillusionment set in quickly with bankruptcy but many people still had faith in the West as saviours. Thousands flocked to Western embassies demanding visas for migration to the USA, Italy, France, Germany and Greece, only to be locked out after a few days from embassy compounds. Western embassies began building fortress-like barriers to keep out the hordes of now unwelcome admirers.

Criminal enterprises and entrenched corruption

Gangster capitalism again took its toll of the innocents when they floated the world’s most notorious Pyramid schemes[2] to steal the remaining savings among the common people. Both the government and the Western and international aid agencies turned a blind eye to this gigantic theft till the schemes collapsed after robbing more than half the available household savings, most of which was stashed abroad by the criminals[3].

Yet the ordinary Albanians retained their capacity for survival. A million people fled the country illegally, across the Southern border to Greece or by boats at night across the Adriatic Sea to Italy. Many took up menial employment while others prospered by forming the most dangerous criminal gangs in Europe, outdoing even the Italian mafia with drug smuggling, thefts of automobiles and trafficking in white slavery. Thieving of luxury autos from Western countries like Germany was so widespread that it was hard to find a genuine automobile importer. While we were in the country, the newspapers reported that a senior Albanian cabinet minister travelling to Greece was held up at the Greek border and had his official Mercedes-Benz car confiscated because it was a stolen vehicle that was identified through Interpol data. Albanian criminal gangs operating in the newly democratised Eastern European states, where the new capitalism had created mass unemployment, abducted tens of thousands of gullible young females with the promise of marriage or employment in the West and sold them to brothel houses in West European capitals.

The desperate need to survive is the first priority for most Albanians. Throughout the day, the roadsides around Skanderbeg Square are lined by over a hundred money-changers waving wads of cash to passengers in passing vehicles. For a small commission they will change foreign currency into local money or vice-versa. Their rates are slightly better than in a bank and you don’t have to wait in line and sign papers.

I had a personal experience of the ingenuity of the Albanian for survival. The Tirana International Hotel houses a large number of foreign guests and the garden in front is the venue for some gypsy families and other hangers on who try to prey on any gullible foreigner through dubious offers or pleas for charity. The hotel lobby itself is guarded by the hotel security staff that scrutinises the credentials of anyone trying to gain entry by claiming friendship with hotel guests.

One evening as I set out for my evening constitutional which would take me along the main boulevard past Tirana University to a lake site about three miles away, I was accosted by a personable young man who first greeted me with the Moslem salah malekum.  I tried to shake him off and stated that I was not the Arab he had taken me for. But he refused to be rebuffed and my efforts to walk faster and avoid him were frustrated as he was younger and stronger. He offered to have coffee with me in a wayside café, a ploy I declined to fall for. Finally, he blurted out what he wanted. He wanted money, he needed it for a serious medical condition requiring surgery, and wouldn’t I, his friend, help him out? I told him that I had worked in over three dozen countries and had received hundreds of such hard luck stories and that I would need to rob a bank to help all these distressed people. We parted company without acrimonious feelings.

Three months later, I was returning from a walk in the evening when I heard someone yelling from inside a new Mercedes Benz car, “Sir! Sir! How are you?” Thinking it was one of our business clients, I went up to the car but not recognising the person said, “I am sorry. I don’t think I recognise you.” At which he brightly said, “Can’t you remember, Sir, I walked with you from the hotel on this road?” Yes, it was our man with the hard-luck story, but he was now prosperous. He now again extended his hospitality by inviting me to ride in his new car and have dinner with him, an offer I politely declined and hastily departed the scene. How had he reversed his fortunes? He had made it the way Albanians do and they had many ways.

I had another encounter which illustrated the working of normal business life in Albania. During week-ends the local Irish Pub in Tirana, a feature in many countries, organised a hike in the mountains. I was on one of these and the young fellow walking next to me struck up a friendship as he was an Albanian-American from New York and we had many common views of America to talk about. He told me of his effort to do business in Albania. He had been in contact with a Pakistani firm that exported basmati rice. Since the quality and price of this product was competitive, he opened a Letter of Credit to import a trial shipment to Albania. During his stay in Tirana, he had a call from a stranger who asked him to meet him at a luxury hotel that evening. He declined at first but agreed when the caller revealed details of his family in Tirana and warned him that it would be in the interests of his family to meet him.

When he arrived at the hotel, he met half a dozen men seated around a table with a bottle of whisky. They pushed a glass of whisky in front of him and asked him to drink. One man spoke: “We know you have placed an order to import a consignment of rice. You must cancel it immediately.”

 “Why should I follow your orders?” he asked.

 “Because I am the one and only party that imports rice into this country.”

 “And if I refuse?” “If you refuse, it will be a sad situation for your family.” Knowing the threat was very real, he cancelled the order.

There are certainly a lot of decent people in Albania but they are living on the fringes. Our UNIDO chauffeur, Abedi Lile, was the head of a provincial music academy in the former communist era and was a composer of music. These cultural institutions disappeared in the new post-communist era for lack of financial support. Then the Pyramid schemes arrived and he lost all his savings. He was still a perfect gentleman and a dignified man without recriminations trying to maintain his family. We always invited him to share our table when we were on tour.

On another occasion, I was having dinner in the hotel dining room which had hired a small group to play classical music for the guests. I was entranced by the playing of the elderly violinist and asked a hotel waiter for his name. He said he was one of the most famous musicians of the communist era. He was now playing in the hotel for his dinner. I sent him a bottle of good wine through the waiter and he later came up to my table and thanked me.

Transparency International in October 1999 called Albania the most corrupt country in the Balkans. The UNDP reported that only 18.8% of the aid given for road construction was utilised for the purpose. The Albanian Human Development Report put out by the UNDP office in 2000 made the following observation.

“There seems to be no social contract between the government and its citizens. This is linked to the manner in which the country has been governed in the last ten years, as well as the way in which the political and economic model for Albania was conceived. Capitalism has often been perceived as a game with no rules, where getting rich justified breaking the law and participation in politics was sometimes seen as a fast way to prosper. While this kind of capitalism has created dynamism it has also encouraged mass idleness by promoting the mentality that one can get rich without really having to work or by being corrupt.”

International agencies estimated that the black economy amounted to at least 50% of the total economy, though it does not come into official statistics. Apart from purely criminal activities like drug smuggling, white slavery, fraud and other mafia-type activity, tens of thousands of unemployed survived by smuggling new and second-hand goods from neighbouring Greece or Italy to be sold in numerous flea markets in the cities.

Even if many Albanians operate outside the law one must credit them with being loveable rogues. They are a sociable and generous people. We often enjoyed the hospitality of our local colleagues who would invite us to their homes for dinners. When we visited companies during our work, the managers usually hosted us for lunch at a local restaurant. They are an attractive and pleasant people, generally very handsome in appearance and stylishly dressed, even if the clothes are second hand ones from the flea markets.

There is another character that distinguishes the modern Albanians: they are great lovers of the United States of America and all things perceived as American. American President George Bush may have had the lowest popularity ratings ever in his own country and in most countries around the world but he had the highest rating in modern Albania. The symbiotic emotional attachment to America can’t be easily explained as the US has very little to do with that country besides an embassy building resembling a medieval fortress designed to keep out Albanian visa seekers.

Some unusual management styles

Privatization, Albanian-style, created some interesting types of business managers and unusual management styles. Albanian privatization had dispensed with the usual transparent procedures involving asset evaluation, tenders, bidding by prospective buyers, performance contracts, prohibitions against asset stripping, etc. Instead they gave state enterprises as gifts to deserving people – and who could be more deserving than one’s own cronies and relatives?

Birra Korca, a brewery in Korca city, was a good example of this philanthropy. An Italian beer factory dating from 1932, it was nationalised during the communist era and privatised in 1993 by gifting it to six elderly gentlemen who were, according to the government, victims of communism who needed to be compensated. They had no working capital to run the business so they sold part of their shares to 5 others to raise cash. After privatization, sales declined from 55,000 hectolitres to 20,000 annually. The six principal shareholders were a jolly crowd, even though they had no idea of the company’s financial state and kept very few records of income and expenditure. The company owned a popular beer garden adjoining the brewery and the shareholders spent the mornings consuming beer and thick slices of fried cheese at this pleasant venue at the expense of the company. Whenever we came to the company on business we were obliged accept their hospitality and join in the revelry to avoid offending them.

The Military Typography Company had at one time been very busy printing government books, documents, posters and propaganda material. With the collapse of communism, business was minimal. They needed to canvass private sector business to survive but this required ministry approval. The old machinery and lack of working capital made them non-competitive with private businesses now getting printing work done in neighbouring Greece. To add to the internal problems, the very competent Technical Director, a very senior gentleman highly experienced in printing, was sidelined as General Director and an attractive young lady who had worked in the Customs Department was made the CEO by the Minister of Industry. The lady was easy going and hospitable but had little knowledge or interest in management issues. She was several months pregnant at the time but every meeting we had with the management was an excuse for her to offer us drinks from her office drinks cabinet and consume several glasses of raki and smoke incessantly. I became a little alarmed for her and took the liberty on one occasion to tell her that, as a grandfather myself, my advice was that she should not drink or smoke in excess during her pregnancy, an advice she laughed off.

NPVU Military Clothing Company was created in communist times to make military uniforms. The General Director was concerned for the company as government clothing orders were now minimal after the removal of compulsory military service and government payments were always overdue. They had good tailoring skills and made fairly well-cut military dress suits. A decision to make men’s suits for the civilian market, based on our advice, was rejected by the supervising ministry without any reasons. Consequently, the General Director appointed a local businessman as export sales agent and went off with him on an expensive and unproductive export tour of several European cities without any export plan or strategy.

To many enterprises manufacturing consumer products in the country, brand marketing meant plagiarizing successful foreign brands. Imitation of other brands and brand names is a form of theft but since there were no patent laws in the country, and no prospect of courts applying such laws even if they were created, the practice was widespread. This was common in the processed food industry. The most popular brands in the market were from Slovenia, which had the best developed economy in the region. Three companies in our portfolio based their marketing on this principle: Sara Wine Company (wine), EN&ZY Company and Ortensio Company (jams and fruit cordials). There was no purpose telling these companies that patent right infringements were illegal or that “me too” products were not sustainable as consumers recognised the difference in an imitation product and would eventually reject it. Thieving other brands was an accepted business practice.

Elbasan Brick Company had a good management team. As a result, management and production was generally efficient, except for a few bottlenecks in the furnace area which our technical consultant rectified. But sales had declined. Our investigation of the distribution system was clouded in obscurity. We were told that there were many local dealers but could not reach them. Finally, after several months, it was revealed that all sales had to be channelled only through the sales yard owned by the principal shareholder who thereby made an additional profit at the expense of the company and the other shareholders. These shady practices could not be eliminated by outside consultants.

In my concluding report about our work I noted: “Considering all these shortcomings, the results achieved by the project are noteworthy. Except for three companies, the project made a positive impact on all the others. The project made it a point to ignore the malpractices that are now part of the national business culture.”

Kenneth Abeywickrama

October 2010.

[2] Sometimes called Ponzi schemes

[3] Since writing this, the world has seen the biggest Ponzi scheme enacted in the USA in December 2008. Bernard Madoff, founder and past chairman of Nasdaq, a part of the New York Stock Exchange, was found to have been running a Ponzi scheme over two decades in the guise of a hedge fund which had stolen US$50 billion from investors who were fooled by his social stature as an important public figure.

a fascinating medieval society 

Of the 42 countries where I travelled in as a businessman or tourist, Yemen in the nineteen seventies was by far the most fascinating. Even flying into Yemen was an adventure. I was the export manager of the Sri Lankan subsidiary of Unilever, the giant Anglo-Dutch foods and detergents multinational corporation, and the Sri Lankan company had just begun exporting cooking fats to the Middle East. It was just before the 1973 Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur war and the oil-rich Arab states (not Yemen though, where no oil was found at the time and remained very poor) had already started using oil as a political weapon and suddenly become very affluent, with the arrogance that goes with it. 

It was September 1973, I had completed a six month management training programme with Unilever in the UK, and my plan was to first visit Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, then Hodeidah (also called Al Hudaydah)  in Yemen and later all the smaller Persian Gulf States. I first needed an entry visa for Saudi Arabia and I duly went on an early morning to the Saudi Visa Office at 17 Elton Street, London, to join a long queue of British businessmen, dressed in business suits and with leather brief cases, patiently standing along the pavement at the entrance to the office. The queue was hardly moving and at around noon a man emerged from the office and berated the visa-seekers, shouting “Now finished for the day, go, go …” Frustrated, I contacted our Saudi agent in Jeddah and he said that he would obtain a visa and bring it to the airport. I went back to the Saudi visa office and asked the Visa Officer for confirmation of this procedure. He curtly told me: “If your agent says so, do it”. His sarcasm was lost on me so I went again to the airline office and was told that I could not board a plane to Jeddah without a visa in hand. Back I went to the Saudi embassy for the visa with supporting business credentials. “It will take a few days for your visa. Nothing can be done in a hurry” said the reprobate. There were special rules for non-Muslims. 

I changed my tickets, omitting Jeddah and travelling first to Hodeidah. Hodeidah could not be reached direct: I would have to transit from Asmara, then part of Ethiopia. There was only one flight a week from Asmara to Hodeidah, and I duly arrived in Asmara on Ethiopian Airlines on October 01, 1973, to catch the Yemeni Airlines weekly flight to Hodeidah. Asmara (now in Eritrea), was a small airport and the only open counter that day was for Yemeni Airlines. We asked for our flight and the man pointed to a small 40-seater plane lying in the runaway in the blazing sun with parts being removed by half a dozen mechanics. The plane needed repairs and we waited patiently. The little airport was full of noisy locals and a few British travellers. One was a young British woman who nervously asked me what was happening. It transpired that she had applied for a job as a nurse in a hospital in Hodeidah after reading an advertisement in an English newspaper. Of what I knew of Yemen, it was not a place for a lone foreign woman but I kept my thoughts. 

By about 7.00 p.m. the Yemeni Air representative was putting up shutters in his office and preparing to leave for the day. The handful of foreigners in transit surrounded him and demanded an explanation. “Come tomorrow, we will see”, he blithely told us. We mobbed him and refused to allow him to leave, demanding accommodation for the night. He led us to a van parked outside and booked us into a small hostel in the town.  

The next morning we arrived at the airport and again waited with patience. Patience is demanded of the traveller to strange places. By afternoon it was announced that the flight was ready. The hoard of noisy locals rushed out first, followed by us. The air outside was blazing hot. There were no numbered seats and the plane was soon full. The locals carried huge cloth bundles full of goods and many had cane baskets with live chickens. There was no room for all this heavy baggage and soon the aisle was full of this. About half an hour later the pilot came aboard. He was a lanky European dressed in khaki shorts and was bare-chested. He screamed at the passengers in a local language and started throwing the baggage and baskets in the aisle on to the tarmac. Then he went into his cabin and locked the door.  The passengers immediately clambered out and brought back their baggage. A little later the air hostess entered. She was a big, dark young woman dressed in a large black gown that covered most of her body. She locked the plane door, ignored the passengers and went into the pilot’s cabin and locked that door behind her. We were now ready for take off. 

The plane took off like a heavy goose, straining to take wing. Once it rose in the air it was barely skimming the palm trees, labouring to reach altitude because of its weight. People all around me were counting beads and saying prayers. There was nothing to do but wait, patiently. My worry was that my agents would miss me at the airport because of these unscheduled delays. 

I need not have worried. The Yemenis know their country and its ways. As I descended the gangway of the plane, three men in local costume came up, inquired my name and then kissed me on both cheeks in turn, beginning with the oldest man. They took my luggage and we went through Customs and Immigration like a breeze: the Shammakh brothers had bought them over in advance and got approval for them to come up to the runway. The rather bare airport was full of noisy locals. Before leaving, I looked around for the British nurse. She was agitated as there was no one to meet her and it was getting dark in the evening. I asked the Shammakh brothers whether we could take her to her hospital. They did not welcome the idea of helping a foreign woman but agreed merely to oblige me. We found the hospital and it was closed for the day without a soul in sight. We left her there and went away as my friends wanted nothing more with her. 

Yemen is said to be one of the oldest civilisations, meaning it was one of the regions of the earth where hunter/gatherers had taken to farming and settled life 12,000 years ago. You could not imagine that now. When it ceased to be part of the Ottoman Empire after its dissolution in 1918 after World War 2, Yemen became an independent nation. Long before the American neo-conservatives, and before President Ronald Reagan discovered that “Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem”, the Yemenis had agreed that “Less government is good government”. Following this credo, even in Ottoman times, the Central Government confined itself to the cities while the real management of the country was in the hands of powerful local warlord tribal leaders, some of whom claimed to be Imams[1]. In US terms, these warlords would be the large corporations that control most of the US economy and influence the government through their lavish political spending. As is to be expected, with little government in Yemen, there was very little education, few public services and social services, and mass poverty while the rich and powerful ran the nation for their benefit. People took what they could, if they could get away with it. However, the moderating force in Yemen was Islam, which provided certain guidelines for conduct and behaviour and obligated charity for the poor. It created some form of social harmony, though it was brutal towards women. 

Al Iryani was President of North Yemen in 1973 and he was trying to modernise society with some elements of parliamentary government and liberalisation of social conduct. This did not suit the neighbouring fanatical Wahhabist Saudi regime and the puritanical local tribal leaders and, in a forerunner of what was to happen later in Afghanistan, he was removed and replaced the next year by a more authoritarian conservative, Col. Ibrahim Mohamed al-Hamdi. We were to glimpse him briefly a few years later. I was travelling by motor car with the Shammakh brothers in Saana. A motorcade with military and police escorts was seen coming on the road. All other vehicles moved out of the road to the grass verge and the Shammakh brothers got out and stood to attention outside their vehicle till the big man passed us, giving us a fleeting glance of the local lord. 

There were two Yemens at the time: North Yemen and the Peoples’ Democratic Republic of Yemen in the south. The ancient commercial port of Aden was captured by the British in 1839 and the rest of Southern Yemen was made a British Protectorate ruled by the local tribal leaders. Aden was an important link for control of Britain’s vast Asian colonies and it was made a Crown Colony governed from India. The Cold War enabled the South Yemenis to revolt against the British with arms supplies from the Soviet Union. Two national liberation groups fought the British till they withdrew in 1967, and then fought each other. The National Liberation Front took power and set out to develop the backward country and introduce modernisation. Since the nation had displeased the West by becoming independent of Western imperialism, it received no international aid. The South Yemeni government had to turn for assistance to the Communist states and hence designated itself a “communist state”. The international isolation of the country outside the communist bloc created a paranoid government suspicious of all foreigners. An extensive secret service kept a watch on all citizens who might engage in anti-government activity. It had become a police state. 

My departure from Yemen would be through Aden, which had an international airport serving carriers to many parts of the world. The name of the company the Shammakh brothers managed was called Yeslam Salim Maasher and originated in Aden. As the so-called communist government restricted private business, they had moved their operations to North Yemen though the senior member of the company, Salim Maasher, the uncle of the Shammakh’s, still lived in Aden and directed some of the business. All of them hailed originally from Hadramaut, a region is South Yemen which had a history of seafaring and trading in the Indian Ocean for over a thousand years. The traditional sarong worn in many coastal regions of India, in Sri Lanka, Burma, Malaysia and Indonesia, may have had its origins in Yemen where practically all males wore the sarong. In North Yemen, in addition, the sarong was held up by a broad belt into which a large curved dagger was usually lodged. This decoration had been prohibited in the South by the British. In addition, most people sported a black coat. What the women wore could not be figured out as they were all covered in a black burqa, if they were ever sighted out of their homes. 

The Shammakh brothers who managed the import/export firm of Yeslam Salim Maasher were astute businessmen and honourable gentlemen. The elder brother, Omer Mahfood Shammakh, was the head and was an affable middle-aged man with a ready smile. Ahmed Shammakh, the second brother, was the only English educated one and was the translator in our talks. The name of the third eludes me and I was not sure of his relationship but he was our motor vehicle driver. Though the country was very poor compared to the rest of the Middle East, with a population of about 15 million, the Shammakh brothers built a cooking fat business for us that was worth about a million US dollars a year. With their knowledge of the local market, we developed a cooking fat with a taste, smell, texture and a packaging that was ideal for the local market. It carried the brand name of Palm Island Vegetable Ghee, a name I invented and was proud of for its success in the Middle East at the time. 

Our close friendship was initiated by me through correspondence by letter and telex (then the only means of fast business communication). It prospered with my annual five day visits between 1973 and 1978. During each visit our routine was the same. First, discussions about the market and deliveries were held in their office in Hodeidah.  Then, the brothers would take me on a tour of the markets covering Hodeidah, Saana and Taiz, the only three cities connected with motorable roads. I had all my meals with my three friends throughout every stay. I was the only foreign business associate so honoured by them at the time. Their wheat salesman from France was also in the same hotel I lodged in but he was ignored after business meetings. Most Europeans would find it difficult to accept their lifestyle. 

Tarmac roads and motor vehicles were still a rarity in the country, though small fleets of trucks operated form Hodeidah port transporting imported goods to these cities. The construction of the three main roads is a tale by itself. They were aid projects by three foreign powers intent on making a local presence: USA, USSR and China. They encountered unforeseen challenges besides the harsh terrain. Local tribesmen, who walked about with their old rifles the way English country gentlemen use walking sticks, took pot shots at the foreign engineers when the road approached their territory. Only the Chinese had the resolve to finish their road and left a testimony to their bravery: a Chinese cemetery was erected near the highest point on the road for the sacrifices of forty Chinese engineers. 

We travelled in a large station wagon owned by the Maasher business. Ahmed sat in the front seat with the driver. Omer Mahfood and I sat in the rear seat with a bundle of fresh qat between us to chew on during the journey. The tender leaves of small branches of this local plant are chewed slowly and it acts as a mild stimulant that encourages conversation and a relaxed attitude. Life without qat[2] in the afternoons would be unimaginable for a Yemeni man. It is harmless and is legal in UK and most countries, except in the US where it is designated a narcotic and prohibited. Chewing qat in a group is a daily social activity for men. 

On the very first day of travel from Hodeidah to Saana, I was fascinated by the scenery.  The country was mostly barren desert with mountainous regions. Interspersed we occasionally saw patches of green cultivation where there was an oasis or deep-water boreholes. Sometimes we would see a small caravan of camels crossing the desert. I missed my camera which I had left in London with my wife who was still there and I told Omer that I needed to purchase a camera. He merely said that he would see how it could be done but wanted to know what kind of camera I wanted. I wanted a Canon SLR. The next morning, when I awoke in my hotel room in Saana, there was a brand new Canon camera in its original packing on the table. At breakfast, I asked Omer how much it cost. He looked at me displeased and said: “Brother, please remember you are my guest’. I realised that it was offensive to decline gifts given as part of Arab hospitality. In future, I would always bring specially handcrafted silver boxes for office use from Sri Lanka for all my Arab business partners in the Middle East to complement the expensive gifts of gold ornaments and wrist watches which I knew awaited me. 

Men in conservative North Yemen greeted each other on meeting with kisses on both cheeks. Male friends would even walk in public hand in hand though homosexuality was unknown. Women were not seen in public except as ghostly figures in black burqas and were never approached by men. I was told on one occasion that a foreign doctor was killed by a family because he tried to medically assist a woman dying at childbirth. 

Two incidents that occurred during my visits to Yemen will remain in my memory. On one occasion we arrived after 6.00 p.m. near Taiz. Saana and Taiz are both ancient fortress cities surrounded completely with massive protective walls with enormous gates as points of entry. Omer told me that the city gates were shut after 6.00 p.m. and the Town Guard would fire upon anyone approaching the main gate after that hour. We stopped at a roadside hostel outside which a line of trucks were parked for the same reason. The hostel was a series corrugated iron sheds with three tier iron beds and no other furniture. The inside smelt like a goat shed with unwashed truck drivers and labourers. But it was the only available resting place for the night and the nights were very cool. Without taking out my suitcase for a night dress, I slept in the lower tier of a bunk bed wearing my European suit. Waking up, I saw Omer and asked him where the toilet area was located. He smiled broadly and took me out, waved his hand towards the sandy desert, and said that his was only available toilet. I suppressed my urge till we reached our hotel in the city. 

The big cities were crowded with multi-storied buildings made of mud brick with winding narrow alleys in between. As rain is scarce, these mud brick buildings have lasted for centuries. They are often painted red on the outside and look very picturesque with their numerous and uniformly square windows, looking from a distance like giant pigeon coops. The streets are busy during the day with people, donkeys, camels and push carts with goods. But by evening it was quiet. The men would sit around on beds (with ropes stringed in place of mattresses) on the pavements, smoke a hookah which was passed around the group, and converse. I readily adapted to this form of pleasant relaxation. 

On another occasion we had an extraordinary adventure. We were travelling from Hodeidah to Taiz in the late evening. The land on either side of the road was desert, sandy and uninhabited for mile upon mile, without a shrub or any grass. We were approaching a cluster of shacks made of palm leaf when a woman, totally covered in a black burqa, ran across the road. The driver tooted the horn and braked hard but the poor woman, whose sight was probably marred by her all-enveloping dress, would not move away in time and was knocked down. 

We got down from the vehicle to help her. Within minutes, out of seemingly nowhere, six rough looking men with rifles joined us. A heated argument ensued with our friends which I did not understand. The woman, who was bleeding from somewhere inside her dress, was carried and placed in the boot of our wagon and three of the gunmen got into the vehicle. We now travelled off-road and into the desert. It was explained to me that we were now heading for the hospital in Mocha, the closest town. We traversed the desert sands guided by our new companions who seemed confident of the way. There was an animated conversation inside the vehicle which was occasionally disturbed by the injured woman who let out an agonised scream of “loo-loo-loo-loo-loooo”. The men would turn back and smack her and ask her in their language to shut up. It was now nightfall and it was very dark when we arrived in Mocha and found our way through inquiries to the hospital. 

Mocha was a small decrepit seaport. At one time, a century ago, it was a famous port in the Red Sea from where the bulk of the Ethiopian coffee was exported to the world. This was the origin of the blend that is known as Mocha Coffee in America. The hospital was really a fair sized house and the doctor was a Chinese man. He came out and told us that he could not accept an accident victim without a police clearance. 

So off we went to the Police Station. It was a three storied building with wooden stairs. We walked the top floor corridor past some rooms with goats and straw giving out the strong smell of animal urine. The Police Inspector woke up from the camp cot in his room where he was snoozing. He wore a sarong and was bare-chested. His rifle hung from a nail in the wall above him. He went to sit at his official desk and an animated discussion ensued. During the course of this he turned to me for my opinion but I had no idea of what they were talking in Arabic. My friends then explained that I was a foreigner. He expressed surprise and said I looked like a Yemeni but a long one, meaning that I was tall in comparison with the average Yemeni man. Since I was now confirmed as a foreigner, he needed to show hospitality. He rummaged in his drawer and found an apple which he vigorously cleaned on his shabby sarong and offered it to me. It was no time to refuse this man who now had us in his control. I ate the apple with seeming relish while tea was ordered for all of us. The discussion ended when the sum of money due to the police was agreed and money changed hands and the letter of authority signed and handed over. We were now all smiles and the atmosphere was very cordial. 

We went back to the hospital, handed the woman over to the Chinese man, and started our journey back to the main road. We now had another noisy argument in hand, to agree on the sum our friends should pay the bandits with us. Once this was settled and money again changed hands, the discussion was very friendly. They may have been old friends recalling happy anecdotes from the past. Soon we were near the road and the bandits wanted to leave us. We all got down from the vehicle to exchange fond farewells. The bandits kissed all of us in turn and expressed sadness over the parting. We all appeared moved by having to leave these fellows who would have murdered us without compunction or held us for ransom if we did not have the money to satisfy them. 

Leaving Yemen through Aden was also an adventure. On arrival in Aden I would be met by the senior partner, Yeslam Salim Maasher. But since the police suspected all and sundry who dealt with foreigners, he would not speak to me in the open area in the airport. He would be recognised as he was a short stout man in sarong and coat wearing a red fez cap. He would walk to his car and I would follow him and enter the car. We would then exchange cordial greetings and talk inside the car. Once at the hotel, he would leave and I would find that my room was booked and paid for in advance. On one occasion, Yeslam Salim Maasher took a bold step. He came to my hotel at night and invited me out for dinner. We went to an old hotel from British colonial times and entered its large dining hall. It had about 40 tables, all laid out for diners, and a dance floor. But there were only about half a dozen men at two tables. There was a large stage at one end where a three-piece band played slow dance music beside a grand piano. A dozen attractive young women dressed in long Western-style skirts stood behind the musicians looking at the audience. This was, after all, a socially liberated communist society, quite distinct from ultra-conservative North Yemen. Perhaps the many Russian technicians in the country visited these places. A notice board near the stage carried the warning in large letters: “Men are forbidden to dance with men”. Salim urged me meet to take one of the girls and dance but I declined. The whole atmosphere was discouraging. We had a good dinner and called it a day. 

In 1979 I left the multinational corporation and joined another business. The exports to Yemen from the company ground to a halt after that. The Shammakh brothers still occasionally corresponded with me. But the story has a sad ending. The Maasher business wanted a certain product from Sri Lanka. I found an exporter of this product in Colombo, also a Muslim family, and recommended them. Several exports were made on the basis of payment by Letters of Credit. But the exporter declined to ship one consignment after receiving the Letter of Credit on the grounds that raw material costs had increased. The Shammakhs’ requested the shipment urgently, offering to cover the increased costs with the next order. But the local exporter did not understand the Arab’s code of honour and that his word is his guarantee. My intervention on behalf of Maasher proved fruitless. They steadfastly refused delivery, demanding an immediate change of the Letter of Credit. I noted that my Yemeni friends were hurt by this lack of trust and I lost their friendship on this issue and the exporter lost the business. 

Kenneth Abeywickrama 

15 October 2010-10-14 

Note by author: I include this travelogue without apology because I believe the best way to understand a society is not merely by studying reports and country data but additionally by getting to know the people personally. 

[2] Qat contains cathomine, a mild natural amphetamine. Its effects wear off after a few hours. 

Pictures of Yemen in the seventies  

All rights to copy reserved. Publication omly allowed with the permission of the author.

Kenneth Abeywickrama

15 October 2010