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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Worlds collide in a luxury
suite By Rebecca Solnit
How can I tell a story we already know too
well? Her name was Africa. His was France. He
colonized her, exploited her, silenced her, and
even decades after it was supposed to have ended,
still acted with a high hand in resolving her
affairs in places like C๔te d'Ivoire, a name she
had been given because of her export products, not
her own identity.
Her name was Asia. His
was Europe. Her name was silence. His was power.
Her name was poverty. His was wealth. Her name was
Her, but what was hers? His name was His, and he
presumed everything was his, including her, and he
thought he could take her without asking and
without consequences. It was a very old story,
though its outcome had been changing a little in
recent decades. And this time around the
consequences are
shaking a lot of foundations,
all of which clearly needed shaking.
Who
would ever write a fable as obvious, as
heavy-handed as the story we've just been given?
The extraordinarily powerful head of the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), a global
organization that has created mass poverty and
economic injustice, allegedly assaulted a hotel
maid, an immigrant from Africa, in a hotel's
luxury suite in New York City.
Worlds have
collided. In an earlier era, her word would have
been worthless against his and she might not have
filed charges, or the police might not have
followed through and yanked Dominique Strauss-Kahn
off the plane to Paris at the last moment. But she
did, and they did, and now he's in custody, and
the economy of Europe has been dealt a blow, and
French politics have been upended, and that nation
is reeling and soul-searching.
What were
they thinking, these men who decided to give him
this singular position of power, despite all the
stories and evidence of such viciousness? What was
he thinking when he decided he could get away with
it? Did he think he was in France, where
apparently he did get away with it? Only now is
the young woman who says he assaulted her in 2002
pressing charges - her own politician mother
talked her out of it, and she worried about the
impact it could have on her journalistic career
(while her mother was apparently worrying more
about his career).
And the Guardian
reports that these stories "have added weight to
claims by Piroska Nagy, a Hungarian-born
economist, that the fund's director engaged in
sustained harassment when she was working at the
IMF that left her feeling she had little choice
but to agree to sleep with him at the World
Economic Forum in Davos in January 2008. She
alleged he persistently called and emailed on the
pretext of asking questions about [her expertise,]
Ghana's economy, but then used sexual language and
asked her out."
In some accounts, the
woman Strauss-Kahn is charged with assaulting in
New York is from Ghana, in others a Muslim from
nearby Guinea. "Ghana - Prisoner of the IMF" ran a
headline in 2001 by the usually mild-mannered BBC.
Its report documented the way the IMF's policies
had destroyed that rice-growing nation's food
security, opening it up to cheap imported US rice,
and plunging the country's majority into dire
poverty.
Everything became a commodity for
which you had to pay, from using a toilet to
getting a bucket of water, and many could not pay.
Perhaps it would be too perfect if she was a
refugee from the IMF's policies in Ghana. Guinea,
on the other hand, liberated itself from the IMF
management thanks to the discovery of major oil
reserves, but remains a country of severe
corruption and economic disparity.
Pimping for the global North There's an axiom evolutionary biologists used
to like: "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", or
the development of the embryonic individual
repeats that of its species' evolution. Does the
ontogeny of this alleged assault echo the
phylogeny of the International Monetary Fund?
After all, the organization was founded late in
World War II as part of the notorious Bretton
Woods conference that would impose American
economic visions on the rest of the world.
The IMF was meant to be a lending
institution to help countries develop, but by the
1980s it had become an organization with an
ideology - free trade and free-market
fundamentalism. It used its loans to gain enormous
power over the economies and policies of nations
throughout the global South.
However, if
the IMF gained power throughout the 1990s, it
began losing that power in the 21st century,
thanks to powerful popular resistance to the
economic policies it embodied and the economic
collapse such policies produced. Strauss-Kahn was
brought in to salvage the wreckage of an
organization that, in 2008, had to sell off its
gold reserves and reinvent its mission.
Her name was Africa. His name was IMF. He
set her up to be pillaged, to go without health
care, to starve. He laid waste to her to enrich
his friends. Her name was Global South. His name
was Washington Consensus. But his winning streak
was running out and her star was rising.
It was the IMF that created the economic
conditions that destroyed the Argentinian economy
by 2001, and it was the revolt against the IMF
(among other neoliberal forces) that prompted
Latin America's rebirth over the past decade.
Whatever you think of Hugo Chavez, it was loans
from oil-rich Venezuela that allowed Argentina to
pay off its IMF loans early so that it could set
its own saner economic policies.
The IMF
was a predatory force, opening developing
countries up to economic assaults from the wealthy
North and powerful transnational corporations. It
was a pimp. Maybe it still is. But since the
Seattle anti-corporate demonstrations of 1999 set
a global movement alight, there has been a revolt
against it, and those forces have won in Latin
America, changing the framework of all economic
debates to come and enriching our imaginations
when it comes to economies and possibilities.
Today, the IMF is a mess, the World Trade
Organization largely sidelined, NAFTA almost
universally reviled, the Free Trade Area of the
Americas cancelled (though bilateral free-trade
agreements continue), and much of the world has
learned a great deal from the decade's crash
course in economic policy.
Strangers on
a train The New York Times reported it
this way: "As the impact of Mr. Strauss-Kahn's
predicament hit home, others, including some in
the news media, began to reveal accounts, long
suppressed or anonymous, of what they called Mr.
Strauss-Kahn's previously predatory behavior
toward women and his aggressive sexual pursuit of
them, from students and journalists to
subordinates."
In other words, he created
an atmosphere that was uncomfortable or dangerous
for women, which would be one thing if he were
working in, say, a small office. But that a man
who controls some part of the fate of the world
apparently devoted his energies to generating
fear, misery, and injustice around him says
something about the shape of our world and the
values of the nations and institutions that
tolerated his behavior and that of men like him.
The United States has not been short on
sex scandals of late, and they reek of the same
arrogance, but they were at least consensual (as
far as we know). The head of the IMF is charged
with sexual assault. If that term confuses you
take out the word "sexual" and just focus on
"assault", on violence, on the refusal to treat
someone as a human being, on the denial of the
most basic of human rights, the right to bodily
integrity and corporeal safety. "The rights of
man" was one of the great phrases of the French
Revolution, but it's always been questionable
whether it included the rights of women.
The United States has a hundred million
flaws, but I am proud that the police believed
this woman and that she will have her day in
court. I am gratified this time not to be in a
country which has decided that the career of a
powerful man or the fate of an international
institution matters more than this woman and her
rights and wellbeing. This is what we mean by
democracy: that everyone has a voice, that no one
gets away with things just because of their
wealth, power, race, or gender.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
