bboc/30_Swiss_bankers_kill_without_machine_guns_Jean_Ziegler.tex

\chapter{Swiss bankers kill without machine guns}

\chapterauthor{Jean ZIEGLER}


Thanks to its banking secrecy, its numbered accounts, the law of free convertibility, the cynicism and the extreme technical competence of its bankers, Switzerland is today the safe deposit box of the world.
In 1998, it was the first richest country in the world (per capita income, according to the World Bank's method of calculation).
Around 40\% of the world's private wealth managed outside their home countries is managed in Switzerland.
Swiss banking fortresses and branches around the world not only host the spoils of cross-border organized crime cartels, the astronomical assets of Russian crime lords, but also the treasure of the propertied and despot classes of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

What is the relationship between the dirty money of organised cross-border crime and the illicit capital fleeing the Third World?
Both are washed, recycled, by the same emirs, using identical banking techniques.
It is often the same organizations that transport this capital, take it across continents, bring it into Switzerland.
The same financial analysts, wealth managers, stock market advisors and stockbrokers reinvest the fleeing capital of the Third World and the dirty money of drugs.

Drugged teenagers on the streets of New York, Milan and London are dying from the works of the Crime Lords;
they recycle and wash their profits in Switzerland. In the Philippines, Brazil and the Congo, thousands of children die of undernourishment, prostitution, abandonment and disease.
Significant indigenous wealth, instead of helping to create local hospitals, schools and jobs, is taking refuge in Switzerland;
they are recycled and reinvested in real estate speculation in Paris, Rome and Tokyo, or feed the Stock Exchanges of New York, London and Zurich.

The financial plundering of the Third World and the drug trade are two works of death, causing similar social, psychic and physiological disasters.
Both benefit from the recognized competence, expert assistance and effective complicity of Swiss bankers.

Here are examples referring to an analysis period of just over ten years.


\section{Filipinos}

In 1986, Ferdinand Edralin Marcos again rigged the national elections. One too many times... The popular insurrection sweeps Manila.
At dawn on February 25, the American protector ordered to flee: helicopters of the United States Air Force landed on the grass of Malacanang Palace.
They evacuated Imelda, Ferdinand and eighty-three of their parents and associates to the American base of Subie Bay Ferdinand Marcos died on Thursday, September 28, 1989 in a US military hospital in Hawaii.

The Asian despot has been, throughout his life, an almost ideal customer for the Swiss emirs: he is immensely rich, he is inhabited by a real mania for hoarding.
The evacuation of the treasury poses no problem: the kleptocrat is himself in power.
In addition, the man constantly plays a double game with his American and Japanese protectors.
As he is, moreover, of extraordinary psychic complexity, he is vulnerable. The emirs can pluck him at will, impose draconian investment and recycling conditions.

Ferdinand Edralin Marcos was born in 1917 in a modest environment, at the extreme northern tip of the archipelago, in Ilocos Norte. The people of this province are taciturn, hardworking.
Its main activity: smuggling with Taiwan and Hong Kong. The three names of the child indicate the drama of his birth:
Ferdinand Chua, a wealthy Chinese merchant, fell in love with the very young Josefa Edralin. Josefa is beautiful, cheerful, intelligent, but poor. In addition, she is Filipino.
The Chua clan vetoes marriage (Ferdinand Chua will marry a Chinese heiress of Fukien). It's the break. But Josefa is pregnant.
His family belongs to the traditional Catholic milieu of the North, a bigoted, cruel milieu that does not forgive the \enquote{illegitimate} birth.
She is desperately looking for a husband for the sinner... and a father for the child who will be born. A schoolboy from the village, poor like Job, aged fourteen, will do the trick: Mariano Marcos.
The teenager is violent, cunning, ambitious. He will be the social model of the child who will grow up at his side.

The young Ferdinand and the one he will take a long time for his father belong almost to the same generation: an intense solidarity binds them. 1935: Mariano is a candidate for the deputation.
He loses the election. The opposing candidate, a well-to-do merchant and smuggler of the place, humiliates his family: he even dares to walk a coffin under his windows.
A few days later, the new MP for Ilocos Norte will be found on the side of a road, a bullet in the head.

Ferdinand, eighteen, is arrested, charged, convicted of murder.

Mariano had him released three years later: one of his friends, José Laurel, had meanwhile become a judge of the Court of Appeal. Laurel is himself a former defendant.

Ferdinand is handsome, agile, intelligent. He completed a brilliant law degree in Manila. He will be a sought-after lawyer.

Around his twentieth year, Ferdinand discovers the secret of his birth and makes contact with his blood father.
His alliance with the powerful Chinese community of the archipelago opened a dazzling political career for him: deputy, senator, president of the Senate, then, in 1965, head of state.

Two episodes in Marcos' life deserve special attention. During the Japanese occupation, he led a group of outside the Japanese occupation.
law called \enquote{Maharlika}. The group practices anti-Japanese resistance, smuggling and arms trafficking.
But Marcos is too clever to put all his eggs in one basket: As a Japanese agent, he betrays many of his fellow resistance fighters.
Upon release, he was tried by the American authorities, escaped the execution pole... and becomes the protégé of the new occupying Power.

Second episode: in 1954, the young mp meets Imelda Romualdez. Imelda is an actress, singer and beauty queen.
Granddaughter of a Catholic priest, she experienced a childhood and adolescence of humiliation and misery. His thirst for revenge is considerable.
However, since the victory of American troops over the Spanish colonizer in 1898, an indigenous oligarchy of sugar cane planters, financiers and great merchants has ruled the archipelago.
Ferdinand shares Imelda's hatred for the oligarchy.

Imelda and Ferdinand are a formidable couple: gifted orator, incendiary and demagogue, Marcos is adored by the crowds.
The poor love Imelda, who distributes rice and clothes in the slums. Until 1972, Marcos was re-elected without problems. Then things go wrong: the hatred of the oligarchy blinds the couple.
His passion for palaces, jewelry, money is unlimited, and the couple literally plunders the country. Marcos, slowly, turns into an Asian despot; Imelda, as Lady Macbeth.
Marcos loves women; he is generous: Carmen Ortega and her three children — one of Marcos' many parallel families — are now among the wealthiest clans in Manila.

September 23, 1973: the despot decrees a state of siege (regularly renewed until 1986).
General Ver, head of the secret services and Marcos' business associate, instituted torture and made opponents disappear.
Putting pressure on his American protectors who maintained, in the archipelago, their most powerful air, sea and land base in Asia, Marcos kept at the same time excellent relations with the Japanese nationalist right that he had served during the war.
In short: its future seems assured. The Swiss emirs are certain to have bet on the right horse.

Let us go back to that morning of February 25, 1986, when the American protector dropped the kleptocrat and a woman of the oligarchy, Cory Aquino, widow of an opponent assassinated by Marcos on August 21, 1983, settled in the Malacanang Palace. Forcibly evacuated to Subie Bay,
Marcos, his sister, his family are taken the same day to Hawaii, in the United States.
As soon as they get off the plane in Honolulu, FBI agents advance towards Marcos and his relatives, confiscating their suitcases and briefcases that contain code names, numbers, the location of bank accounts distributed around the world.
The FBI hands over these documents to the new president of the Philippines, Cory Aquino.

President Reagan's reasoning is as simple as it is convincing: three guerrilla armies, two of which are making rapid progress, threaten Ms. Aquino's fragile pro-American power.
The success of this indigenous guerrilla, without any notable links with any foreign power, is essentially nourished by the abyssal misery of families in the semi-feudal countryside and proletarian cities.
If Cory Aquino wants to survive, he must quickly make massive social investments in the city, a consequent agrarian reform, a reconversion of sugar plantations in the countryside. All of this will cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
For President Reagan, there is no reason for the American taxpayer to pay these new and huge credits... while billions of dollars, stolen by Marcos and his family, sleep quietly in Swiss banks.

But, as we have said, against the emirs, the government of the Confederation can do nothing. He is more helpless than a newborn.
Banks are impenetrable fortresses. No law allows the State, its government, its Parliament to obtain even information on the identity of the creditor, the amount of the deposit, the origin of the capital that feeds the numbered accounts.

The pressure from President Reagan, the FBI, the US Secretary of the Treasury is getting stronger and stronger.
The Federal Council is trying to procrastinate, to explain its singular impotence: in recent years, the American authorities have shown great brutality towards Switzerland...
The Reagan administration does not let itself be told and demands in an imperative way, threats of trade sanctions in support, the blocking, then the restitution of the billions stolen by the kleptocrat of Manila.

Cornelian drama at the Bern Palace: should we violate Swiss law, set the emirs against ourselves, please the Americans and therefore block the accounts?
Or is it better to confront US sanctions, protect banking secrecy and let Credit Suisse, the Union of Swiss Banks, etc., peacefully hand over their loot to Marcos and his courtiers?

On the night of Monday, March 24, 1986, the illumination occurred during the gala dinner offered by the government to the President of the Republic of Finland, Koivisto, in the great medieval hall of the Bern City Hall.
The atmosphere on the side of the federal ministers is grim: American pressure - telephone calls, diplomatic demarches, increasingly precise threats on Swiss exports to the United States - increased further over the weekend. The guests sit at the table.
Professor Mathias Krafft, Legal Adviser for Foreign Affairs, obtains from the security services the opportunity to enter the Great Hall.
He goes straight to Pierre Aubert, Minister of External Relations, and hands him a paper. Aubert, beaming, leans towards the President of the Confederation, Alphonse Egli.
As soon as the last speeches were made, the dessert swallowed, Egli gathered his colleagues in the lounge of the town hall, where dinner was held.
The Federal Council decides to temporarily freeze, with immediate effect, all the assets of the kleptocrat, his family and his allies in all banks operating on Swiss territory.
Earthquake: this is the first time in the country's centuries-old history that such a decision has been taken against the emirs. Officials call them the bad news that night.
As for the stunned public, it will be officially informed by a press release on Wednesday, March 26.

The legal basis for this reckless decision? Simply the Federal Constitution. In its preamble, it invokes God, the supreme authority:
\enquote{In the name of Almighty God, the Swiss Confederation wanting to strengthen the confederate alliance, maintain and increase the unity, strength and honor of the Swiss nation,} etc.
Article 102, paragraph 8, obliges the Federal Council to \enquote{look after the interests of the Confederation outside};
in particular, it must assume \enquote{the observation of its international relations}; it is \enquote{generally responsible for external relations}.

Forced to choose between interests \enquote{from the outside} and those \enquote{from within}, the Federal Council, in a fit of lucidity, opted in favour of the former.

Ferdinand Marcos reigned twenty-three years in his palace in Malacanang.
From 1973, it governed by the repression of trade unions, the Church, peasant organizations; by the systematic assassination of major opponents;
by methodical torture, the frequent \enquote{disappearance} of men, women and teenagers challenging his megalomania, his despotism, his unfathomable corruption.

Here is how the kleptocrat organized the plundering of his people:

Every year, Marcos took sums equivalent to several million dollars from the coffers of the Central Bank and from funds intended for the secret services.

Within two decades, Japan, a former occupying Power, had paid the Manila government hundreds of millions of dollars in war reparations.
Marcos took his share from each payment.

The Philippines is one of the thirty-five poorest countries on earth.
The World Bank, the specialized organizations of the United Nations, private mutual aid organizations have paid it tens of millions of dollars over the years and have invested millions more in many so-called development projects.
Marcos, his court, his accomplices have used with great constancy on almost all these transfers, each of these projects.

Given the unfortunate insubmissiveness of the starving people, Marcos had to quickly declare a state of emergency and renew it from year to year.
Concentrating in his hands almost all civil and military powers, he used the army to occupy and then expropriate hundreds of plantations, commercial companies, real estate companies and banks, belonging to his critics, to attribute ownership to his own generals, courtiers and henchmen.
Many companies and plantations passed directly into the hands of his family and that of Imelda.

But Ferdinand Marcos, conceited, greedy and cruel, was also a man of foresight. He had few illusions about the feelings he inspired in his people. 
A consortium of Swiss emirs helped him evacuate his booty annually. One of them was even specially seconded to the satrap of Manila.
He constantly advised him on the most discreet and efficient way to transfer his capital abroad and reinvest his capital there.

What is the total amount of loot hidden abroad, mainly in Europe and the United States?
A serious estimate estimates the lump deposited with Credit Suisse and forty other Swiss banks at a sum between 1 and 1.5 billion dollars.

The camouflage of the booty of Marcos and his family obeyed a complex strategy.
The emir who had been seconded to Manila and his staff were engaged almost full-time (since 1968) in the valuation and recycling of money.
They managed to maintain daily contact with the kleptocrat, including when he was (from March 1986) interned at the AMERICAN air base at Hickham, Honolulu.
Initially, these rivers of dirty money were directed to multiple numbered accounts at Credit Suisse in Zurich. First wash.
Then the loot was transferred to the fiduciary company \enquote{Fides}, where the stash changed its identity a second time.
Fides belongs to the Empire of Credit Suisse. Finally, third wash: Fides opened its locks, the muddy rivers left, this time to Liechtenstein.
There, they rushed into carefully prepared structures, the famous Anstalten (untranslatable term, specific to Liechtenstein, meaning approximately: establishment).
At the present stage of the proceedings, eleven have been discovered. They all have poetic names: \enquote{Aurora}, \enquote{Charis}, \enquote{Avertina}, \enquote{Wintrop}, etc.

Picturesque detail: in 1978, in order to rationalize the transfer of capital, Marcos appointed Consul General of the Philippines in Zurich a director of Credit Suisse!

In his correspondence with the emirs, the code name used by Marcos is (as early as 1968) \enquote{William Sanders}; that of his wife, \enquote{Jane Ryan}.
Swiss bankers will create dozens of investment companies in Liechtenstein, Panama, buy hundreds of properties in Paris, Geneva, Manhattan, Tokyo, process hundreds of thousands of stock market transactions on behalf of the mysterious Sanders-Ryan couple.

Despite the proverbial skill of the Swiss emirs, Sanders-Ryan's American empire will only partially withstand the fall of the satrap. New York judges indict Ryan-Imelda.
They accuse him of having made on american territory for more than \$ 100 million of private purchases, settled with money stolen from the Philippine Treasury.
Dozens of buildings bought in the same way by Sanders-Marcos (or his shell companies) are sealed.
Yankee judges - decidedly shameless! - even have Interpol arrest one of the most distinguished front men of the fallen kleptocrat: Adnan Kashogi, a Saudi billionaire.
It was picked up one morning in May 1989 at the Hotel Schweizerhof in Bern. He will be incarcerated in bern's central prison, before being extradited to the United States.

But what happens to the loot hidden in Switzerland? The American pressure is massive.
For the first time since the Swiss banking system operated, a major complainant has the exact documents proving the location, the criminal origin, the identity of the accounts.
The usual and convenient defence of the Swiss authorities, invoking the inviolability of banking secrecy and pleading ignorance, is no longer enough.
Glory to the Republican and reactionary administration of President Reagan! His brutality pays off.
In five Swiss cantons, proceedings are opened for the return of stolen property at the request of the Government of the Philippines.

Cory Aquino, excellently advised by the American tutor, appoints three respected politicians and lawyers to recover the loot:
Guy Fontanet, from Geneva, former State Councillor and National Councillor of the Christian Democratic Party; Zurich's Moritz Leuenberger, National Councillor of the Socialist Party;
National Councillor Sergio Salvioni of Locarno, a member of the Radical Party. These honest and experienced men are now exhausted.
Because the tax advisors, the conveyor networks of the Swiss banking consortium have done an admirable job of camouflage.

Manila is the Asian capital of child prostitution (13')\rfootnote{A typo that was supposed to be a footnote, but I did not find any foonote?}. Millions of sugarcane cutters live in complete destitution.
Their children are trying to survive as best they can. Undernourishment, endemic diseases due to hunger ravage hundreds of thousands of families on the islands of Luzon, Mindanao, Vebu.
In 1997 the gross national product amounted to just over \$40 billion. (It's about \$133 billion in Switzerland.)
Two-thirds of the 58 million Filipinos live in what the World Bank modestly calls \enquote{absolute poverty}.

Do these martyred children, women and men have the slightest chance of seeing the billions of dollars stolen by Marcos and his gang return to the country? Honestly, I don't think so.
Regiments of capable and brilliant lawyers were mobilized in the service of Marcos and twenty-nine other holders of escrow accounts:
they appeal after appeal against the least of the procedural decisions of the most modest of the cantonal judges (usually overwhelmed by the stakes of the battle).

In the spring of 1998, only a small fraction of the loot returned to the Philippines.


\section{Haitians}


Spring 1986: Another dictator falls. \enquote{Baby Doc} Duvalier is kicked out of his palace in Port-au-Prince like trash.
The same scenario is repeated: Haiti's North American guardian seizes a large number of documents from the fugitive's luggage. He passed them on to the new satraps of Haiti.
Duvalier, his family, his in-laws had drawn on the foreign exchange reserves of the National Bank, looted state-owned enterprises, sold import licenses for their benefit, etc.

June 1986: A request for international legal assistance arrives at the Federal Palace in Bern. Same embarrassment. Same American pressures.
President Reagan demands the return of the spoils to the bloodless Haitian state after forty years of rule of the Duvalier clan.
The Federal Council is forced – pushed by the courageous Socialist Finance Minister, Otto Stich – to order the provisional sequestration of the Duvalier et Cie funds in the Swiss banks.

This time, most of the loot is in Geneva.
Multinational banking empires — the Union of Swiss Banks, the Swiss Bank Corporation, Credit Suisse, etc. — practice a judicious division of labour between their subsidiaries.
Zurich attracts funds from Asia and the Middle East; Geneva, countries in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America.

The miserable people of the island of Haiti have, like the Filipino people, very little chance of returning to their possessions.
Thanks to the fierce resistance of the banks — this is called \enquote{defending one's client by all means} — none of the multiple proceedings brought against Duvalier and his family is on track to succeed.
Meanwhile, \enquote{Baby Doc} and his clan sink a sumptuous retreat on the mild heights of Grasse. In 1998 they moved to Jura.
In 1998, the Duvaliers' fortune, the result of a fierce looting of several decades, still rests on the numbered accounts of major Swiss banks.


\section{The Zairians, now Congolese}

The Zairian people are beggars sitting on a pile of gold. The Zairian subcontinent, 2.3 million square kilometers large, is full of wealth.
Multinational mining, banking and foreign commercial companies, in perfect collaboration with the local oligarchy, conscientiously plunder the country.
In Kinshasa (more than 3 million inhabitants), Kisangani, Lubumbashi even, the families of civil servants eat only once a day.
At the end of 1997, the external debt amounted to more than \$9 billion.
In his native village of Gbadolite, on the high river, in the deep forest that, from the \enquote{Cuvette} (Basin) (Zaire), extends across the Bateke plains to Gabon and the Atlantic, Marshal Mobutu built a real Versailles of the jungle.
37,000 inhabitants, huts made of cob, clay... and boulevards illuminated day and night, a myriad of palaces, guest villas, swimming pools, a Coca-Cola factory, a gigantic hydroelectric dam (located 15 kilometers from the village, in Mobayi, on the Oubangui), a cathedral where Jesuit fathers teach Gregorian chant to the little geniuses of the tribe, an ultramodern airport where a Boeing 737 landing every day directly from Kinshasa.

The U.S. State Department estimated in 1997 that Mobutu invested \$5 billion in personal wealth abroad.
As for the average per capita income, it is \$180 per year, making Zaire the eighth poorest country on the planet.
Undernourishment, corruption, misery and police repression claim victims every day.
Faced with the solid complicity of Western capital with the regime, on the one hand, and the weakness, corruption and intellectual indigence of the few groups of exiled or clandestine oppositionals, on the other hand, the horizon of the Zairian people is dark:
it is reduced to the promise of new suffering, repeated humiliation, despair.

Mobutu, a former informer of the Belgian colonial police, was one of the most complex, cunning heads of state that the tumultuous history of decolonization has produced.
He enjoyed strong foreign protections, and was willing to pay the price. He was an outstanding negotiator.
Example: during one of his many \enquote{private} visits to Washington (February 1987), Mobutu concluded an agreement with the Pentagon by which he ceded to the United States, by a long-term lease, the Kamina military and air base in Shaba;
it is now from Kamina that the Americans organize their logistical support to the Angolan UNITA.
In return (in addition to foreign currency payments as rent), the Zairian regime obtained, in May of the same year, a new rescheduling of its external debt.
While the laxity of its economic policy is universally recognized, the regime snatches from the IMF, in 1987, a credit of 370 million dollars.

The so-called \enquote{internal security} system is formidable:
the paracommando units trained by Israelis and French who guard Mobutu, his government, his family, are almost all from the \enquote{Cuvette}, of the former province of Equateur.
With several presidential palaces, a sumptuous yacht, rest homes, etc., Mobutu prefers to sleep among his own:
his place of work and ordinary stay is located in the heart of the camp of the paratrooper units of Kalina (western district of Kinshasa).

However, unlike most of his Middle Eastern, Asian or African counterparts, Mobutu carefully avoids colonizing the state and civil society by settling his relatives and friends there.
It imposes a rotation of the cadres of the government, the single party, the economy:
periodically, the entire management of Crown corporations, ministries, the party, provincial governors, etc., are dismissed and replaced by new teams, who believe that they are entitled, each in turn, to enrich themselves freely.
Corruption, prevarication, looting of public funds (monopolization of import and export licenses, etc.) are thus erected as a method of government.
This system ensures the sustainability of the supreme power. Every clan, every great tribe, every family network can hope to one day pass within reach of the public coffers.
It just has to wait, remain docile and show a minimum of adherence to the regime.

Sometimes a little unexpected happens. Example: a Zairean protest student living in Europe, Nguzà Karl-i-Bond, is recruited as an ambassador and sent to Washington.
Nguzà Karl-i-Bond became Prime Minister in 1977. Then he was deposed.
As he could not stand his disgrace, he went into exile in Brussels, where he published an incendiary book against the \enquote{tyrant}, made contact with anti-imperialist European intellectuals, pretended to negotiate with the United States the constitution of a government in exile.
At that time, he sent me a letter full of revolt, asking for an urgent appointment in Geneva and my help in denouncing the regime.
A few months later, the fierce opponent decided to return to Kinshasa.
A few wads of dollars brought by discreet emissaries, the prospect of soon driving again in an air-conditioned Mercedes, occupying a luxurious office villa and making a fortune have overcome his determination.
Karl-i-Bond, recalled, became Minister of Foreign Affairs, then, again, Prime Minister.

I bring up a memory. One spring day in Geneva, the absolute master of Zaire, Marshal Mobutu Sese Seko, disembarks from his private Boeing at Geneva-Cointrin airport.
Red carpet, honeyed words of Swiss officials at the foot of the footbridge.
Wearing his leopard hat (suggesting filiation with the Mwami Kongo), dressed in a black vareuse of North Korean inspiration (reviewed and corrected by the expensive genius of Parisian couturiers), the fold of the impeccable pants, the marshal walks, followed by his courtiers with a creamy smile, towards the central hall, then towards the exit.
His bodyguards jostle the annoyed Geneva gendarmes.
The Column of Mercedes, several of which are armored, starts in the light of the spring afternoon. Head to the Noga-Hilton Hotel, Quai Wilson.

Mobutu, his sister, his guards, his wives are on a private visit.
Two of his children studied at the University of Geneva. The marshal will stay a few nights at the Noga-Hilton, with his friend, the real estate developer, broker in African oil and cotton, Nessim Gaon.
Then he will go to join, for a stay of \enquote{rest}, his property of Savigny, huge stately home on the heights of Lausanne. But, for now, Mobutu receives his Geneva bankers.
Meanwhile, his ministers, friends, officers and women rob the luxury boutiques of the rue de Rhône, the jewellery shops on the Quai des Bergues, paying for the rivers of pearls, diamond brooches, Rolex watches and gold rings with wads of 1,000 Swiss franc notes that the bank clerks have just slipped to their bodyguards.

In front of the hotel, leaning against the balustrade of the quay, a few dozen Zairian exiles hold signs clumsily painted with worn slogans:
\enquote{Freedom for political prisoners}, \enquote{Down with tyranny!}, \enquote{No to the torture of our comrades}.
The Swiss walkers of this beautiful afternoon make a detour to avoid the cluster of exiles. Suddenly, from the entrance of the hotel, dozens of armed Zairean gorillas appear.
They rush to the students. They are real professionals: young people try to flee, but the malabars catch up with them, one after the other.
In teams of three, they surround them, throw them on the ground, trample them. The violence is such that a member of the hotel's security service, revolted, calls the Geneva police.
Two gendarmes arrive. They do not intervene. Clinging to the trees on the dock, the students' jagged signs sway melancholy in the afternoon breeze.

The action of the marshal's bodyguards is completely illegal: the students were demonstrating peacefully on the public road.
Several students later went to the police station on Rue Pécolat and filed a complaint for assault and battery.
None of these complaints will succeed. As one passer-by said: \enquote{Negroes have beaten Negroes... }

Mobutu was at the time one of the richest men on earth: his immense country contained considerable deposits of diamonds, manganese, cobalt, uranium and copper.
Since much of his fortune was in the basements of Swiss banks, the local emirs received juicy commissions annually from the treasury of the Zairian head of state.
In short: the federal authorities have nothing to deny the respected customer of the big banks. A few days later, some of these opponents will be pushed into a Swissair plane, handcuffed to the wrists throughout the flight.
Direction: Ndjili Airport, Kinshasa. The Zairian secret police will receive the exiles when they get off the plane. Mobutu Sese Seko's vacation really started at that time.

When he left Switzerland three weeks later, the admiring newspapers told me that the marshal had had to rent a large truck in order to transport to his private Boeing the mountain of \enquote{gifts}, purchases of all kinds, which his companions had accumulated during their stay on the shores of Lake Geneva.

In June 1997 the revolutionary forces of Laurent Kabila's AFDL (Alliance of Democratic Forces for Liberation) entered Kinshasa.
Mobutu and his family fled to Gabon and then to Morocco. The kleptocrat died shortly afterwards of cancer in Tangier.
The new government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is asking the Swiss government to sequester Mobutu's property, his immediate relatives and his main accomplices.
Accounts are blocked in Switzerland. But only those who bear the name of Mobutu (and his own).
Ridiculous operation: because the financial empire of the kleptocrat, which for 38 years (reminder: Mobutu came to power in November 1965) benefited from the expert assistance of the best Swiss bankers, consists of 99\% offshore companies, Anstalten of Liechtenstein, fiduciary accounts - in short:
assets, only a tiny part of which are under the name of Mobutu. Switzerland is therefore only blocking \$6 million.
The rest of the \$11 billion officially sought by the Kinshasa government's \enquote{Bureau des biens mal acquis} (Office of badly acquired goods) (official title) remain supposedly untraceable.

Let us conclude: In his Research on the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote in 1776: \enquote{Wealth like health is taken from nobody}.

Error! The hundreds of billions of dollars from the Congo, the Philippines, Haiti and many other Third World countries, which sleep under the pavement of Zurich's Bahnhofstrasse, Lugano's Corso Helvetico or Geneva's Corraterie, or transit through fiat accounts before joining the stock markets of the West,  are the blood, the misery of the peoples of the three continents.
While in Africa, Latin America and Asia children prostitute themselves, die of hunger, families break up, men and women search in vain for shelter or work, the billions of corruption, tax evasion and looting held by the ruling \enquote{elites} of these countries are accumulating in Switzerland.

Chapter XVIII of the Book of the Levites (French edition of the Jerusalem Bible) mentions the strange and terrifying story of this Middle Eastern deity called Moloch.
The Canaanites regularly sacrificed to him children taken from the imprisoned tribes, from the poorest families. In front of the huge and impassive bronze statue erected on a mountain in the middle of the desert, a fire burned day and night.
Every thirteenth moon, columns of children trembling with fear, miserable, hungry were brought before the monster; they had their throats slit, and then their butchered bodies were thrown into his mouth wide open.

Like Moloch, the Swiss multinational banking oligarchy feeds on the flesh, the blood of the captive peoples, bound to tribute, of the three poorest continents of our planet.

\rauthor{Jean Ziegler}

Jean Ziegler is a Member of Parliament for Geneva in the Parliament of the Swiss Confederation; Professor of Sociology at the University of Geneva.

He has just published: \emph{Les Seigneurs du Crime, les nouvelles mafias contre la démocratie} (The Crime Lords, new mafias against democracy), Éditions du Seuil 1998, 308 pages.