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‘There will be blood’
There are lots of interesting thoughts in this interview. I especially agree with this part:
Heather Scoffield: Will globalization survive this crisis?
Niall Ferguson: It's a question that's well worth asking. Because when you look at the way trade has collapsed in the world in the last quarter of 2008 – countries like Taiwan saw their exports fall 45 per cent – that is a depression-style contraction, and we're in quite early stages of the game at this point. This is before the shock has really played out politically. Before protectionist slogans have really established themselves in the public debate. Buy America is the beginning of something I think we'll see a lot more of. So I think there's a real danger that globalization could unravel.
Part of the point I've been making for years is that it's a fragile system. It broke down once before. The last time we globalized the world economy this way, pre-1914, it only took a war to cause the whole thing to come crashing down. Now we're showing that we can do it without a war. You can cause globalization to disintegrate just by inflating a housing bubble, bursting it, and watching the financial chain reaction unfold.”
Heather Scoffield: Is a violent resolution to this crisis inevitable?
Niall Ferguson: “There will be blood, in the sense that a crisis of this magnitude is bound to increase political as well as economic [conflict]. It is bound to destabilize some countries. It will cause civil wars to break out, that have been dormant. It will topple governments that were moderate and bring in governments that are extreme. These things are pretty predictable. The question is whether the general destabilization, the return of, if you like, political risk, ultimately leads to something really big in the realm of geopolitics. That seems a less certain outcome.
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The ‘mutiny’ in Bangladesh is an indication of the types of local conflicts that have an ability to get much bigger to arise from this global meltdown.
I’ve been studying the furore of the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) rebellion.
The BDR began as a two hundred year old proto-imperial ‘border control’ force. Founded by the english in 1795 during the pre-raj days of the East India Company, this force whose enlisted personnel generally come from rural farming families, has a significant role in maintaining security on the Bangladesh/Indian borders and the Bangladesh/Myanmar border.
The current size of the BDR is around 70,000 enlisted personnel and despite the Bangladeshi government’s claims of a settlement, the insurrection has spread from the Dhaka barracks out to BDR bases in other cities . If the revolt reaches the border outposts, it will likely cause destabilisation in the region as border skirmishes are frequent enough already.
The duties include anti-smuggling operations although a significant cause of conflict is caused Indian Border Security Forcer patrols’ penchant for crossing into Bangladesh for a spot of raping, looting and pillaging. The conflicts between the BDR and BSF became so intense that a conference was convened in March 2008 to try to sort out some of the problems.
Significantly the Bangladesh Rifles website was taken down yesterday and the Google cache provides little usable information on whether how the causes of this revolt, but the structure of the Bangladesh Rifles is certainly a major cause of the insurrection by enlisted soldiers.
Following the tradition created by the english imperialists when they first formed this force, known initially as the Ramgarh Local Battalion (to become the Eastern Frontier Rifles after the ‘sepoy mutiny’in 1895 when it was integrated into the english run Indian Army) where the officers were all english, the BDR officer class are provided by officers of the Bangladesh Army on 2 or 3 year secondment.
The BDR is an army of the Home Ministry not the Defence Ministry which is responsible for the rest of Bangladesh’s military.
It is this administrative confusion combined with a management culture that has no sense of loyalty to the force they manage which breeds the endemic corruption within the command structure of the force.
Pay rates are low (about $70 a month). Probably not such an issue for a force that is fed and housed in barracks, except that the Bangladesh Army officers responsible for organising supplies for the men have been creaming it big time. It is they who first paid the price of their greed.
From AFP via Yahoo
Colonel Mujibul Haq, the third highest ranked BDR officer with a special responsibility for food distribution, was killed during Wednesday’s revolt and his body was found dumped in a drain outside the guards’ barracks.
The enlisted men have been the only real constant during the two hundred years of Bangladesh Rifles’ history. A major source of their public respect comes from the time back when Bangladesh was part of Pakistan, known as East Pakistan. Then officers were seconded from the Pakistan regular army, so as soon as succession began, the enlisted men overwhelmed their officers, killing a number and capturing the rest, then declared themselves part of the armed forces of the new Bangladesh, and joined the Bangladesh Liberation War.
Two BDR soldiers were posthumously awarded the Bir Srestho, the highest honour given to military in Bangladesh.
Yet the politicians didn’t get the hint and recognise that it may be a good idea for this force to have a career path, to have an officer corps that was actually part of the BDR!
Sure the army would have resisted partially because of bureaucratic empire building and partly because of the culture of perks based rorting the enlisted men of the BDR, a practise which dated back to the days of the East India Company.
This force has been able to easily change sides from private army to public defence force, from sworn defenders of the english empire to the Pakistan Republic’s military, and from Pakistan’s military to Bangladesh’s defence forces, chiefly because the command structure isn’t integrated into the force.
Now that would seem to me, if the BDR were working to protect my administration, as a very good reason to create an indigenous BDR command structure.
The anti-smuggling and Myanmar border patrols must have been the source of major funding from the amerikan empire, especially back in the pre-Afghanistan days when Myanmar was the number one source of heroin for this planet. Even now when Afghani hammer is as low grade as Mexican brown or Iraqi grey, Burmese white powder is still regarded as the primo shit by the smack cognoscenti about the world, and is therefore still a DEA target product.
Yet the grunts doing the hard yakka of catching the smugglers, interdicting islamic fundies moving from Bangladesh to India, are copping roach infested rice for breakfast linch and dinner, and no one fixes it?
It is no surprise that the Bangladeshi government is in such a hurry to cover this up and move on while implying the whole thing is a plot to destabilise their new administration. However it wasn’t smart for them to go back on their word within an hour of reaching agreement then ‘having the ringleaders rounded up and shot’.
They forget these guys aren’t all just grunts because that’s all they are capable of, these guys are grunts because that is all they are allowed to be.
The rebels would have known the odds of the government going back on the deal was almost 100% so they had made contingency plans, which especially included growing the rebellion.
Like so much of what has happened about the globe in the past couple of years as the ordure has hit the ventilator, those in charge seem as though they have no knowledge of what has gone before. They keep trying to re-invent the wheel so are repeating the same errors as the original inventor.
The Bangladesh government is terrified of upsetting the army by stopping their perks from scams such as the corrupt management of the BDR.
This is because the government imagines the army will stage yet another coup if they get upset, so they aren’t fixing any of the problems that years of the military mal-administration of Bangladesh has created.
Meanwhile they are busily re-instituting their old scams, the ones that gave the army an excuse to stage a coup last time.
When viewed in light of the increasing destablisation of South Asia in general and the sub-Continent in particular, this seemingly minor revolt may be the pre-cursor to much more. It is a shift of the fault lines further South and East than before, Bangladesh is also south of the volatile Indian state of Assam which has been in rebellion with Delhi for at least two decades.
Expect many more of these brushfires as the anomalies caused by imperialists trying to buy a state through pouring money into the elite of that state but not ensuring any real distribution of wealth occurred. Consequently the masses suffer all the disadvantages of a globalised economy such as inflation and a completely cash economy replacing the traditional partial barter system, without reaping any of the rewards eg amerikan dollars.
The global meltdown has made many simple existences unsustainable, it is unlikely that the people will conform to the neo-con dream and trot off quietly to find a spot in which to curl up and die.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Feb 26 2009 21:44 utc | 20
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