Nostalgia Kills

Nostalgia Kills

In the sixties, Tripoli, Libya, had an Italian flavour. The ruins of Roman Leptis Magna were magnificent and just some day- tripping distance out- of- town, on the azure Mediterranean coast. Rome itself was an hour by the planes of those days. And Malta, perhaps twenty minutes of flying time and some half an hour to the parking slot on the apron.

 The overlay was American because of the extensive oil connection. And the recent past was to do with WWII, the Rommel versus Montgomery North African conflict, Tobruk, the “Desert Fox”, and the British 5th Army, still there. But in 1966, it was pulling out, 25 years after the war, in line with post-war treaties.

Downtown Tripoli was redolent of plazas, piazzas, fountain roundabouts, brewed coffee and Italian chanteuse Wilma Goich played loud out of record stores to lure in the buyers. The Libyans in the reign of King Idris were monarchy moderates. And the expatriate living was easy.

The Americans were there with their biggest military airbase outside of Europe, and it was from here that they supported Israel in the 6 day war of 1967 that humiliated Nasser’s Egypt.

Wheelus Airbase had a tremendous Golf Course and the best hamburgers I’ve ever eaten. Thanks to the American military presence the general population enjoyed American TV with serials such as “Gunsmoke” and “Have gun will travel”.

Westerns were popular in those days. You could have seen a young Clint Eastwood, in yet another called “Rawhide”, where he played a “trail boss”, driving cattle on the hoof across territory to the meat processing plants in the city.

And then there was rock n roll and Country & Western on the radio. America travels with Americans wherever they go.

From this neo-colonial idyll in which I lived and left, the place morphed into the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya under Colonel Gaddafi. Then followed the bizarre image building, the many attempts at Arab and African and even Arab solidarity, the state terrorism, the attempts to go nuclear, the rhetoric against the US, and finally, what seemed to be a Western brokered reconciliation.

Only to fuel a “home- grown insurgency”, and the denouement, with a stereotypical dictator’s death, deep in the Sahara.

In between,  Gaddafi’s Libya lived under American sanctions and overseas account freezings. There were others, then and since,  in the same boat - Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, South Africa, Israel, The Palestinian Authority, and now Iran and Syria. Others, not mentioned here, on all five continents.

Together, adversity being the mother of invention, virally, disparately, they developed a vast underground banking system, forged trade documents,   and became expert  at other necessary dodges.

There were, and are, enabling countries such as Dubai in the UAE, and good old Pakistan, and even Russia and China and Saudi Arabia. The covert and intelligence apparatuses of most countries also use the same networks for illegal transfers, banned arms sales and the like, all flowing furiously but under the radar.

The nod and wink of the underground and the accommodating underworld, is highly sophisticated and reliable.

All our front- page news merely consist of the eruptions that break the surface and indeed operate at visible, if not transparent, levels. But a lot of the big work goes on through back channels, tacit agreements, shadow economies and slush funds. There Governments can operate unfettered and interact with “non-state actors” all they want.

Everyone is necessarily adept at sleeping with the enemy. It is the only way for civilised skulduggery to operate. But the new kids on the block tend to defy all norms even as they settle down into the system.

Al Qaeda is no longer revolutionary. It is a multi-national corporation. The Pakistan Taliban is the Harvard of guerrilla warfare inspired terrorism and the school of DIY low-cost murder and mayhem.  

On the surface again, we have our Finance Minister going to Washington to parlay with the World Bank President, one Mr. Kim, in the presence of the UN Secretary General, the self- same South Korean Mr. Kim Ban Ki Moon that beat our suave Mr. Tharoor to the job with George W Bush’s backing. All Mr.Tharoor had were Mr. Manmohan Singh’s good- offices.

Mr. Chidambaram told Mr. Kim, The World bank Chief, and the media, that India needs at least another trillion dollars from the private sector. This, to complement all its Government and international lending agency money over the next five years,  for India’s infrastructure development.

Mr. Kim told him, and the media, how the World Bank has stopped funding a corrupt series of projects in Bangladesh for the last 10 years. The World Bank has indeed agreed to help India, but the details are not known and bracketed with this veiled warning.

Meanwhile, official and non-official India possesses a robust parallel economy, and trillions stashed abroad. If we launch an amnesty scheme, no questions asked, with a guaranteed return on investment equivalent to that of the foreign lending agencies, we won’t have much trouble in raising just one trillion dollars.

And if this kind of thing is politically fraught above- ground, the money can always be brought in via fronts and hawala channels used by most political parties anyway.

All we need is some imagination and less hypocrisy to liberate ourselves from many dilemmas.

  (881 words)

April 22^nd, 2013

Gautam Mukherjee