Siss! Siss! Siss! Boom, Boom, Ba! Tajikistan U., Rah! Rah! Rah! Yes, folks, that's the ticket, as the U.S. of A. rolls out the University of Central Asia as the human face of Pipelineastan's repressive regimes that are propped up by the American taxpayers. From Uzbekistan to Kazakhstan, from Kyrghistan to Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, the most barbarous and tyrannical governments pay homage to their great benefactors, George W. Bush and his team of monochromatic warmongers. Never mind that the U.S. G. wants to off Saddam Hussein for being a tyrannical lunatic possessor of WOMDs (weapons of mass destruction.) The pack of crackpot dictators that rule Central Asia makes him look like King Solomon.
Oh, yes, the despotic rulers are only temporary, we are told. Remember Jeanne Kirkpatrick's famous distinction between authoritarian regimes and totalitarian ones? The distinction that enabled America to overthrow and murder Allende and put the hateful Pinochet in power in Chile, to be advised by Milton Friedman, while we strove to assassinate Fidel Castro? Well, the good old days are back. The right timing for democracy is something we and we alone control. So in Central Asia, we will give them the University of Central Asia, where Central Asian students can gradually learn how democracy works, so in, say, three hundred years, after we have plundered all the oil and gas, they can govern themselves properly. And in the process, American professors can go over there and draw down gigantic salaries in a gigantic boondoggle, so they can come back and bore everyone at dinner parties about good old Tajikistan U. "Can you imagine, we had raw yak meat and fermented camel's milk for dinner!"
Heading up this specious enterprise is Fred Starr, an amiable American who served as president of Oberlin College and who is now with the Johns Hopkins University, the institution that will oversee the creation of Tajikistan U., undoubtedly with C.I.A. oversight, and with U.S. A.I.D. funding. He is just the right sort to put the human face on the empire. But we have been down this road before, and I can attest to the disastrous consequences.
You see, I was a professor of law at the Haile Sellassie I University in Addis Ababa, where the students, who were supposed to learn about the rule of law in a repressive and archaic monarchy that was of strategic importance to America during the Cold War (our planes took off from bases there to rescue the Saudi royal family from an attempted coup by young air force officers) all turned into communist revolutionaries who despised America for supporting a backward and undemocratic regime. They overthrew the old emperor and helped to install a particularly ruthless Marxist-Leninist regime headed by Colonel Mengistu, who promptly had them all put to death.
But the Americans who keep up these futile policies are like the Bourbons of France, of whom it was said, "They learned nothing and they forgot nothing." In the mindless self-righteousness of American colonialism, we sow the seeds of our own destruction. And when the disasters strike, we want to know why they hate us. Hey, it's the repression, stupid.
September 2, 2002
Richard Cummings [send him mail] taught international law at the Haile Selassie I University and before that, was Attorney-Advisor with the Office of General Counsel of the Near East South Asia region of U.S.A.I.D, where he was responsible for the legal work pertaining to the aid program in Israel, Jordan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. He is the author The Pied Piper – Allard K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream, and the forthcoming novel, The Immortalists.
