Groucho Marx is famously said to have
turned down the membership of a club with a
characteristic putdown, "I don't care to belong to
a club that accepts people like me as members."
Last week, Muhammad Yunus and his creation the
Grameen Bank must have felt the same way after
being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Snide
remarks apart, the prize recognizes that to win
any war on terror, the focus must be on nipping
the sources of terrorism in the bud. The war is
far from won for Bangladesh, with forthcoming
elections presenting a keen
battle between modernist forces and regressive
forces that wish to radicalize the population and
produce more cannon-fodder for battling the West.
It is my keen hope that countries around the
world, and particularly around South Asia, learn
from the Grameen experience and perhaps even
make
the experience self-sustainable.
A
prize not worth having? For the first time
in a long while, I believe that the Nobel Peace
Prize has been awarded to an entity that actually
prevents the creation of new violence, rather than
rewarding photogenic politicians for work that is
quickly forgotten or even reversed. Unlike in the
case of prizes in various subjects including the
sciences, the Nobel Peace Prize does not examine
either the sustainability or stability of
achievements that lead to the awards. That is no
vile characterization, as a select list of recent
winners shows us:
2005: The International Atomic Energy Agency,
whose claim to peace contributions has been
shredded by the proliferation activities of North
Korea and Iran, that it was supposedly monitoring.
2001: The United Nations, whose handling of
the situation in the Sudan has produced nothing
short of the second genocidal calamity in Africa
in 10 years after Rwanda.
2000: Former South Korean president Kim
Dae-jung, whose Sunshine Policy paved the way for
North Korea's recent nuclear tests.
1996: Bishop Dom Belo and Jose Ramos-Horta,
whose work on East Timor failed to result in a
sustainable entity, as seen by recent tragic
events; and my personal "favorite".
1994: Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak
Rabin. What the former contributed to world peace
since the award is too well known for me to bother
elucidating on.
With a club containing
such members, Grameen Bank has a long task ahead
to prove itself as a sustainable operation, and
one that contributes meaningfully to the
alleviation of poverty as well as the perpetuation
of women's rights. I have written in the past
about the religious underpinnings of terrorism [1]
but also about the impact of social factors on
radicalization [2].
As we will see below,
the key spoiler to Grameen Bank's operations
arises from the fecund politics of Bangladesh,
which appears to be heading in the same direction
as the failed democratic experiments elsewhere in
Southeast Asia [3].
Rural poverty and
terrorism All across South Asia, increased
rural poverty has contributed to rising violence.
Most famously, the destabilization of Nepalese
democracy by Maoist forces since last year can be
cited as a terrifying end-result of years of
neglect in feudal societies.
On a similar
vein, the radicalization of parts of Pakistan can
be attributed to recurring rural poverty.
Meanwhile, in India, the New York Times recently
reported that some 17,000 farmers had committed
suicide after crop failures, the figures for
people desperate enough to join Maoist forces in
central and southern Indian is likely to be many
multiples of that figure, by simple extrapolation
of what desperate people are likely to do.
Examining the cannon fodder in the global
terrorist network shows us a combination of
comfortable middle-class warriors, such as
Mohammad Atta, who are radicalized by religious
fundamentalism rather than the environment. Almost
by definition, such terrorists cannot be cured,
but must be prevented from acting.
In
contrast, the rank and file of the Taliban, Maoist
groups and Sri Lanka's Tigers all appear to have
strong economic reasons for joining these
movements, that is, wrenching poverty. Herein lies
the potential for amelioration offered by Grameen
Bank and other sustainable rural poverty
alleviation programs.
The programs work by
providing micro-finance, ie small loan amounts,
for rural folks to start businesses. Mainly, it is
used to purchase raw materials such as those used
for handicrafts, although at times it is used for
more value-added businesses such as decorating
textiles. With a straight-forward mechanic, the
overall impact is to diversify farmers' revenue
sources.
This is particularly important in
weather-reliant South Asian states, where a truant
monsoon can make the difference between a bumper
crop and utter starvation [4]. The bank is owned
by the poor, therefore government involvement is
kept to a bare minimum. Impact analysis The primary impact is cultural in South Asia,
a region where the people are poor yet proud. In
such a region, charity invariably creates a sense
of obligation between donors and recipients, which
has been vastly misused by various organizations
for purposes ranging from proselytizing and
radicalizing to the more mundane vote-gathering
that occurs in India.
In contrast,
micro-finance creates more tangible obligations -
loans which people work to repay. Additionally,
lenders are part of the community as well,
therefore the idea of adjusting to external inputs
is not germane.
A secondary impact of the
process is to make women more central to the
function of families, with lower reliance on men.
This has proven to be useful in most Islamic
societies, with Turkey and Bangladesh leading the
way. Simply put, women in such societies tend to
be less prone to radicalization and more focused
on economic well-being.
Indeed, the
experience in Bangladesh is unique in some ways in
that radicalization appears to be almost
exclusively an urban rather than a rural
phenomenon, quite different from the more
broad-based field which serves as a breeding
ground for terrorists in other South Asian
countries.
The third aspect of
micro-finance, and one that appeals the most to
me, is the fact that it turns the dissemination of
aid on its head. The "top down" culture of aid
organizations provides a set of central rules and
principles to be adopted, which causes aid
recipients in, say, rural Pakistan to parrot the
concerns of far-away Palestinians.
Indian
government programs are almost invariably daft,
producing significant wastage as well as political
linkages. In contrast, micro-finance provides
assistance based on business proposals and past
history of repayments, and is therefore a "bottom
up" program that has limited use and place for
centralized principles besides the obvious one of
making good loans. As a means to short-circuit the
vicious cycle of terror and corruption permeating
many South Asian societies, one really couldn't
ask for more.
Cautionary footnote Keeping in mind the unfortunate trajectory of
past recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, Grameen
needs to work on its own sustainability. Reading
through reams of papers on the bank over the past
few days, I find that its operations are largely
sub-optimal on a self-sustaining basis.
The difference between a sustainable
operation and bankruptcy has been made good with
external aid, this mirrors observations by many
others as well. Financial troubles arise because
many loans are not repaid, and, as with many other
Asian countries, Bangladesh is rife with
corruption [5].
All of that takes some
sheen off the Nobel committee's exuberant praise
of this organization, but I am optimistic that
recognition by itself probably provides the bank
with its best hope for setting an example that the
rest of South Asia would do well to follow.
Additionally, Western governments would do well to
examine this route as a sustainable means to
stanch the germination of new terrorists from the
region.
make
the experience self-sustainable. 
