Voice of Russia
October 15, 2013
In many countries US imperialism operates by default – Viseslav Simic
Audio
World organizations and military blocs are being used by the West to subvert the sovereignty of nations. This is easier to do with broken countries where the West can destroy the legitimate government and the deal with warlords for example, as is the case in Libya, where the country is shattered and the West has access to the resources by dealing directly with the authorities in the region where the resources are. The Voice of Russia spoke to Professor Viseslav Simic on these issues and more.
This is John Robles I am speaking with Mr. Viseslav Simic, Doctoral Candidate at the Technology Institute in Monterrey, Mexico, he is a native of Serbia.
Robles: Hello, how are you this afternoon?
Simic: I am very good, thank you very much.
Robles: It’s a pleasure to be speaking with you. You wrote a very well-written paper titled “the International Community in Territories with Altered Sovereignty.” In your opinion, in what ways is the so-called international community altering the sovereignty of nations in order to facilitate their own ends?
Simic: It is a subject that came up in the last 20 years, 15 years, the topic of sovereignty, and they have been ridiculing it in the West, the concept of sovereignty over the last couple of decades, trying to diminish it and to actually kind of cancel it out, in the countries that they want to intervene in, while they are of course preserving all the aspects of sovereignty, in the West and especially in the United States.
Right now they are trying to at least alter sovereignty, they are not cancelling it out completely, but we are experiencing this period where we cannot really define what is happening in many of the countries right now, or many of the territories, (That is why I said “territories” because many of these places are not even countries anymore), like Kosovo, and it has so many sovereignties overlapping and cancelling each other out at the same time. And we really don’t know what is going on in Libya, for example or what they are planning to do in Syria.
Robles: You see that these countries, and Kosovo, they really have no say in their own internal decision-making processes, the way you are talking about for example, Libya?
Simic: Yes, absolutely, because right now we have a situation where, as we just learned yesterday or today depending on where you live in the world, that the Prime Minister of Libya had been kidnapped and then released. We don’t know who did it, how it is possible to kidnap the Prime Minister of a sovereign nation.
And to go back to Kosovo for example, their own constitution says that the ultimate authority, which is sovereignty in just different kind of words, is NATO, even though their own constitution says that institutions of Kosovo are not going to be questioned, or even consulted and they have no right whatsoever to question or even request any explanation about anything they decide or the UN decides, even though officially at least for the United States it is a sovereign country and for many European countries too.
Robles: The organization such as NATO, first it was the United Nations in Somalia, and they tried to do the same thing in the former Yugoslavia. They set up a caretaker organization, or “oversight body”, for example with the case of Somalia, there is no central government. The ultimate authority there is the UN Mission “overseer mission”. How are these organizations being used and what other organizations are being used, to compromise the sovereignty of nations?
Simic: It is a very interesting development because it was, I believe very strongly, when Russia was very weak under Yeltsin and when China was not really capable of getting involved too deeply in international relations and was keeping mostly to itself, they set up these missions through the UN and they totally hi-jacked the world organization and used it for the interests of a very small number of very specific countries in the west, but now the problem is that they try to make it that way and set up kind of like a “blueprint” for the way they would take over certain territories.
But now with Russia exercising its rights, especially in the UN, and China, at least not voting for, if not blocking completely, certain actions like in Libya or in Syria rather, now they are seeing in the West that this is not the way. It looked like the perfect way to control everything and to exercise the will of the West because Russia and China were complacent and following whatever the west was doing and right now the west is experiencing a setback if not a complete defeat in the international arena.
Robles: I’d argue that Russia was not agreeing with it. Originally in Kosovo the agreement was that Russian peacekeepers would be involved and then NATO just said “No, sorry Russia, no Russians are going to be involved”. And Russia was supposed to guarantee the sovereignty of Serbia, I don’t know if you remember that.
Simic: Yes, yes and Russia is guaranteeing and actually preserving it, at least legally-officially- technically-speaking, in the UN, even though Russia still has not been able to revoke the new status of Kosovo as it is established by the US and western European countries.
Robles: Don’t you think it would be very difficult for Russia to do that with the complacency of a lot of the population especially maybe the younger generation, they are apolitical, they don’t seem to really care, they don’t seem to understand what is going on? Would you say that is the case?
Simic: I disagree with that. I go to Serbia very often and I am in touch with lots of people and I actually think that the young generation is very political and very ready to change things. The problem is that we don’t have any leaders right now in the politics of Serbia. Any good ones have been eliminated and only the ones that are obedient to the west or that are being blackmailed by the west are being forced upon the population.
So, there is no organizational structure, there is no political party, there is nobody who can actually do anything. As probably you know they fire up the population, especially the young people, with gay parades and things like that that really don’t not matter in real terms, and it looks like nobody cares about Kosovo, when they do.
Robles: I’ve heard that over and over again; that the government is not the government of the people and the government has its own agenda, which is the European integration, westernization and the people are upset with that. Isn’t there something more that the people can do?
Simic: There is always so much more that the people can do but “the people” is a term that doesn’t really mean much by itself. There is a need for leaders, or for at least some political movements or some political force that will organize and present a vision and a policy to the nation and be elected to the parliament and then start passing laws that will change things and take over and become the government and govern the country.
Right now we don’t have that and it is very chaotic, it is all ad-hoc as things come up and it is all retroactive, there is always at least one if not ten steps behind the west and the policy imposed by the West.
Robles: You’ve been in Mexico for quite some time.
Simic: Yes, now almost four years.
Robles: Mexico is on the borders of the greatest imperialistic power on the planet. How would you compare the western influence in Mexico to the western influence, or the American influence, in Europe and in Serbia?
Simic: I would say that here they don’t really have to impose anything because the upper class, the ruling class in Mexico, or the leading political groups in Mexico are basically by default very pro-US. They know where the money is, where their interests are and they push for it and they don’t consider the interests of the nation so much.
In Europe, at least in Serbia or in Eastern Europe, in some of the places, they do have to impose, here it goes on by default, even though the population, and I can tell you with my students, even though my students at this university are from… this is a private university and it is very expensive, and the kids are from kind of upper middle class and upper class levels, and still the young people see this and they feel very humiliated, especially for example now with the scandal with the spying of the president Mexico and the Mexican government activities by the US, and they compare it with what happened in Brazil or how Brazilian government reacted to it, in Mexico they just basically buried it and didn’t want to talk about it.
So, the young people are very upset about that and they want to exercise their sovereignty, they want to expand to other areas of the world, they want to have an opening to Europe, to Eastern Europe, to Russia, to China but they are stuck with NAFTA and many other agreements and with the general policy of the country totally with the US and they are heavily dependent on everything that is going on in the US.
Robles: I think maybe there is a concerted effort to keep Mexico away from Europe. Just a case in point for our listeners; it took me approximately three days to finally get a hold of you.
Simic: Yes, it was very strange, because I couldn’t believe that in this age we can not connect.
Robles: Yes, I make calls all over the world all the time, hundreds of calls, and I’ve never had as many problems getting into anywhere except Serbia, and then this problem with Mexico.
Simic: That is maybe why I feel at home in Mexico.
Robles: I see, that is actually not very funny.
Simic: Yeah, I know.
Robles: Shouldn’t Mexico be looking towards South America, Central America? I mean the Latin American bloc and the South American Spanish-speaking nations, I mean; it’s actually a much larger force than all of the English-speaking world, I mean, population-wise and territorial-wise and resource-wise I believe. Why isn’t (or is) Mexico leaning towards more anti-imperialistic policy such as those in Bolivia and Venezuela, etc.?
Simic: I think there are possibilities here, especially among the young people, but the thing is that Mexico has been so integrated into the American system, into the western system that it is very difficult to change things. And the ruling parties have been so entrenched here that it is very, very difficult to even envision any way of getting people organized in different way.
The media are basically controlled by the same people who push for this pro-US policy, but you can feel it in the streets, in seeing all the protests all the time against policies of the government and you can see it even with the kids from upper classes I said. They are dissatisfied, they can see that something is not really going on the way it should be but just as in Serbia there is no organized political party. That is the way things function.
We need a political force some voice that will articulate all of these needs, present a policy and actually run for government offices and to the parliament and change the laws. It sounds very simple. I guess we, professors, have a tendency to see it as very simple but it is very difficult to do it in practice especially when there is no money to support all these activities.
Robles: Back to international organizations, and we can get back to political parties in a minute, the World Bank, the United Nations, other international organizations; how have they been used in Kosovo to subvert the sovereignty and how are they being used around the world with regard to resources, territory, etc?
Simic: I believe, when I started working on my thesis (doctoral thesis) in public policy and public policy of international organizations in territories under their jurisdiction and administration, which is something totally new, not too many people have actually even looked into this,
Robles: Very interesting.
Simic: … and it was very interesting. I thought in the beginning that Kosovo was a blueprint how things will be in the future, that they will follow this but I think that they figured out that it is much easier to have “no” sovereignty, or fake sovereignty, or altered sovereignty and to just burst in, mess things up, set up some war lords, like in Libya and then have businesses, especially concerning oil or any other important resources, deal directly with these people on the ground who control that specific area.
And of course you can always bring in NATO to liberate somebody and bomb the ones who are opposing you and then continue with the western businesses exploiting those areas.
So, I think the UN has basically outlived its role, its usefulness to the West. I don’t know if it had any usefulness to the rest of the world but we can see that it’s being ignored completely.
Robles: By the United States in particular, right?
Simic: Absolutely. Yes
Robles: Libya was a perfect model because right before they were attacked and Muammar Gaddafi was assassinated, they were planning to change the oil trade from dollars into the Euro as was Iraq.
Once they bombed Libya, they installed their own banking and economic system that was based on the dollar. They returned the oil trade to the dollar and they oil is flowing freely to the West and Libyan people live with continuous blackouts, nobody knows where these; upwards I think of about 40 million barrels a day, nobody knows where al that oil is going. And the Libyan people, they have an energy shortage, they have blackouts, they have problems fueling their vehicles.
How do you see that carried out for example in Iran? I just want to underline the fact that Israel is still, to this day, right now: they are importing oil from Iran. They are dependent on Iran, their so-called arch enemy, for oil.
Simic: Well for these basic necessities they don’t care they don’t recognize enemies or friends, it is need and it has to be satisfied, so it’s been going on, if you look into history, from the beginning of the world. The biggest enemies have been trading and you could have seen it in the former Yugoslavia; where Serbs, Croats and Muslims in Bosnia traded between each other while they were killing each other (and men and women) and burning villages at the same time, the semi-mafias or darker sides of those governments were trading and continuing business with each other.
The same thing in Kosovo, you could see that Kosovo used to produce enough electricity for basically Serbia.
End of Part 1
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