Allegations of corruption and bribery about Pérez Molina, the President of Guatemala, is high on the agenda. The Guatemalan Congress took a unanimous decision to make Molina resign from presidency, and he was arrested on suspicion of fleeing abroad as I was writing these lines.
We have started witnessing very often that the presidents, who were once treated as “invincible armadas”, head for the courtroom before long with their families and top government executives, to whom they were once very close. In Indonesia, for instance, it was claimed that Mohamed Suharto amassed a fortune worth between $15 billion and $35 billion. He is currently on trial with his family. The country’s income per capita was $895 during his presidency. In the Philippines, where the income per capita was $912, Ferdinand Marcos managed to increase his fortune to $10 billion. He couldn‘t find time to spend his fortune after he had to flee his country. He passed away going back and forth to court. His wife, Imelda Marcos, remained alone with her 3000 pairs of shoes, which became the symbol of his fortune. In Peru, Alberto Fujimori’s stated fortune was over $600 billion when he was forced to resign! And so on… The meeting point of these statesmen is “bribery, corruption and abuse”!
Actually, we can always argue how right it is to confine this problem to bribery, corruption, abuse and similar concepts! I suppose sociologists will evaluate this issue much better. However, it seems like these kinds of events that we witness come up as a matter of “character”. I am talking about the character of a country managed by people in the related period rather than the characters of these people. If top statesmen and especially their family members adopt a way of performing an action against public sensitivity and values, a traffic warden, who has to fine someone for speeding, can end up accepting a bribe offered inside a licence by claiming that he’s got “the right” to do this.
Or starting a summer house cooperative by changing the ratings of legally-protected areas can be defined as “a right” by the property owners in the related area. The same “character” can step in when public seashores are turned into places “forbidden” to the public as tourism establishments. If these kinds of things can happen in the top levels of a government, they can happen in these places, too! The form of development and urbanisation in a city that you visit clearly reveals the amount of bribery, corruption and abuse in that city anyway. It also shows who is involved, of course!
If “well-read boys” brought from the USA under the name of “princes” got bogged down in bribery and corruption in Turkey, is this only their fault? “What kind of bribery would have a record, you p*mp?” Wasn’t this sentence engraved on our memories as decoration of our business lives? Engin Civan, who was the addressee of this laconic statement, was obviously not ethical when managing his business! The Mafia demonstrated “the drill” with a bullet! He survived with a wound to his arm. He works as a hardware dealer in the USA now. However, Engin Civan has gone down in history as a “brand” of character in terms of the business method in 1980s. Mingling with “the aides of the First Lady” to win a state tender, and defining kneeling and kissing the hands of the “First Lady” as a tender process may be among the images referring to the “character” of that period.
What is interesting is that masses of people approve of bribery, corruption or abuse even if they know about them! This is a sociological case. Look at the example of Jet Fadil! Masses of people crowned his attempt to manufacture automobiles in Siirt by electing him as an MP. People who invested in Jet Fadil’s unfinished buildings and who were left empty-handed suddenly ended up in a project that he would undertake in the Maldives. What’s more, they shot the works for it!
A “character” builds itself like this. It has nothing to do with being educated or uneducated. If it was so, what would we say about the people, including famous sportspeople, film directors, businesspeople and even bankers, who invested $50 billion in Bernard Madoff?
Life promises “happiness” to us. However, we work on how to turn it into “unhappiness”, and this might last a lifetime. Being against corruption, bribery and abuse is a definition of “character” just like supporting them. This is a challenging fight which will also last a lifetime!
This fight is a total paradigm.
To inject decisions like “the drill” of the Mafia into life as “law” or “regulation” after a while shows that this fight is not a matter of ethics but a matter of character.
We can convey the above-mentioned character set-up to international institutions and meetings.
There was a B-20 Business Summit in Turkey. And we all know that the main agenda of the B20 Business Summit was these concepts that we do not like. This must be a joke. I wonder if the representatives of the countries attending this meeting think that holding an international meeting about “corruption, bribery and abuse” is a “blatant” show, to put it mildly, in a country where these concepts are constantly on the agenda and all around us, and where people have a run of bad luck if they want to do something against these concepts. Do they “titter” during these serious talks, handshakes or official meetings?
I think they don’t! The matter is “the pot calling the kettle black”. In other words, it is a matter of who plays what role in the historical development of the same erosion of character.
For instance, the world, especially Europe, is experiencing one of the biggest problems of this century.
Millions of people are emigrating in masses. They are leaving their homelands, their mothers, their fathers and even their kids. They are looking for “hope” on those inflatable boats, which fight against wild waves, at the expense of their own lives. Some of them succeed. But only in coming ashore. They actually head towards a life without a compass and without knowing what awaits them in the days to come. On the other hand, thousands of them abandon their hopes in the salt water of the seas as the three-year-old kid whose dead body was washed up on a beach in Bodrum.
When you list the factors which make these people emigrate so helplessly, isn’t it possible to find traces of the political, economic and social sanctions imposed especially in the last century by the developed countries which attended the B20 summit?
And if these people are forced to lose even their “dignity” only to be able to survive, shall we evaluate it as a problem that has arisen “today” and find a solution to it?
“Boat people” is a tragedy which has been experienced since 1980s. However, it has never affected Europe. Not long ago, tens of thousands of people who escaped from pressure, fear and conditions incompatible with human dignity in South Asia spent their lives on boats which were not accepted by anyone. It was the tragedy of people who had different ethnic identities in a different location. That’s all!
People who were born in 1990s in Europe experienced a crisis for the first time in their lives. They became unemployed! They lost their savings, their houses and maybe their futures. However, we do not know what they have been told about what happened and why! How aware are they that the people who do politics in the name of the high values of the EU have been lying to them for years? Who explains that the countries like Iceland, whose income per capita was $63 thousand, moved down to the league of poor countries in one night, and how do they explain it? How come the boot was on the other foot in a night when everything was going well in Spain, Portugal and Ireland? Will they start “emigrating” soon? To where? For how long? What will they find?
The borders are being opened for refugees now. They are becoming neighbours of people with whom they will live for years and who do not have the same religion, culture and language as theirs. The coordinates of life are changing. Its DNA is changing. How will they get accustomed to this radical change when they already struggle with difficulties?
Burkina Faso is a poor African country. Its people make a living from cotton. Or they rather try to make a living. Because, they cannot find any place to sell their cotton honourably due to the “it-is-all-mine” type of attitude in the agricultural policies of the cotton-producing countries, most notably the USA. Eventually, they have to give up and sell it for a song to merchants. Since they cannot make a living, they try to borrow money. From where? Yes, you got it right! From the International Monetary Fund. These debts pile up over the years, of course. Thus, a country is totally doomed to hunger and poverty in a spiral of interest. The people who give up hope in life due to epidemics and the “tricks of calculating politicians” have only one choice: To set sail at midnight on the Mediterranean Sea, on an inflatable boat which is full of helpless people like themselves. To look for hope on the opposite shore without knowing what will happen to them. Of course, if they can get there!
How about the children who are separated from their families when they are about ten years old in Mali, which is one of the poorest countries in the world, and forced to work for peanuts in the cocoa fields of the neighbouring countries? I have told this story in detail in my blog post entitled “Sour Chocolate”.[1] Don’t “we” become a part of this crime unless the chocolate that we eat heartily gets stuck in our throats when we find out that this situation is caused by the sourcing policies of major chocolate producers?
Let us think this way: What if everything was “ethical”? What if the daily life flew according to the code of ethics? Life would be so boring, wouldn’t it? There would neither be any excitement nor anything to fight for in any areas of politics, economy and social life.
A life by the book. Kindness is all over life. Personal interests and expectations are replaced by public interests. “Ethics” step in where the rules, laws and regulations are not sufficient. Black is as clear as white. A life which would even make Socrates want to get up and have a look at. It is, of course, an extreme scenario which would not even be the subject of a movie.
I don’t really wonder what the Mafia would do then. They call it “the drill”. A series of unwritten rules. And it is like clockwork. If there is a problem, they solve it among themselves according to their own methods! However, life goes on for them. Laws, regulations, rules… They don’t give a damn. Because “the drill” appears as laws or regulations if there is a matter of character in the government.
Don’t you think what shaped life when alcohol was prohibited in the USA in 1930s was not the politicians’ eclipse of reason, but the series of “the drill” that was communicated to the politicians by the Mafia? Didn’t politicians face allegations of “bribery, corruption or abuse”?
The Mafia manages its jobs through its own “drill” nowadays. You don’t need to go too far. Look at the human traffickers behind the system which leaves people to their fates in the Mediterranean waters. You will see that there is no difference between the tragedy of the people that they leave for dead by putting human life at stake because of their own interests and the labels of “bribery, corruption and abuse”, which are squeezed between the wheels of politics and economy. “The drill” of the Mafia prevails over human dignity!
It all comes to the matter of “character” in the end! Because “bribery, corruption and abuse” are only a series of irregularities that we see on the tip of the iceberg. Your heart hurts so badly when you look at the bottom of the iceberg. Because “character” is woven there stitch by stitch. We want “ethics” on the tip of the iceberg, but “the drill” at the bottom of it serves our purpose. It manages our lives. Then, we discuss “bribery, corruption and abuse” on the agenda of the B20 business summit.
[1] KADIBESEGIL Salim, Sour Chocolate ; http://www.salimkadibesegil.com/en/2012/08/
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