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THE TIMES OF INDIA, Thursday 14 October 1999
The Growing Empire of Transnational Evil
By RASHME SEHGAL
GLOBALISATION has helped expedite information and money flows across the world. Its flip side is that easier information and money access has resulted in an alarming increase in organised crime. Crime syndicates have emerged as one of the most powerful threats to the nation state, especially in the case of poorer countries who often lack the means or the political will to end this growing terror machine. The increasing criminalisation of business, politics and government has been a direct outflow of this phenomena.
In an unusual departure from past practise, the UN has used the platform of its annual Human Resource Development report, usually aimed at highlighting social issues, to press the alarm bells on how organised crime cartels could, in the coming years, establish such an iron grip on world economies that it would be impossible to root them out.
Last year alone these syndicates had a turnover of $1.5 trillion, a figure that surpasses the combined GNP of more than 50 of the least developing nations in the world. Their earnings are multiplying at a rapid rate while the income of governments is on the decline.
Crime Syndicates
Dubbing these syndicates `crime multinationals', the report seeks to draw a parallel between their style of operation and that of the multinational companies doing business across the globe. Syndicates such as the Six Triads in China which controls the restaurant trade of London, the Japanese Yakuza in the business of promoting pornography or the US-based Cosa Nostra controlling the heroin trade have developed strategic alliances with key partners whose linkages unfortunately remain largely invisible. So pervasive is the trade that even enforcement agencies are finding it difficult to unravel their manner of operation.
Like multinationals sourcing out work to cheap labour in poorer countries, syndicates too have spread their tentacles over several countries. A luxury car hijacked in Johannesburg finds its way effortlessly to the streets of Moscow. A shipload of Bangladeshis is offloaded in England. Thousands of Ukrainian girls are being smuggled and sold into prostitution in the Netherlands. All this requires organisational skill and high level contacts and these syndicates know how to operate.
Their growing power can be gauged from the fact that in western Europe alone 500,000 women and girls from developing countries are shackled to the sex business. By the UN's own admission, child prostitution alone is garnering a profit of $700 million per year. In the same way, the number of drug users has risen to 200 million, threatening entire neighbourhoods and communities the world over. This illegal drug trade alone has crossed the $400 billion mark, outpacing the combined trade in iron and steel and motor vehicles across the globe.
India too has become trapped in a vortex of rising crime. Cases of extortion, kidnapping, drug peddling and prostitution have risen dramatically and the financial turnover of these underworld accounts is mind-boggling. Gangsters such as Dawood Ibrahim, Abu Salem and Chotta Shakeel operate out of Dubai, while Chhota Rajan operates from Malayasia. The government has already spent several thousand crores of rupees in trying to extradite Dawood Ibrahim but has failed.
The arms trade is another billion dollar industry. A lesser known but equally dangerous fall out of this illegal trafficking in weapons has been the rise of private armies and the destabilising effect this is having on vulnerable societies. Defence is becoming privatised and international private military firms are proliferating. These mercenaries, hired to protect multinationals, soon acquire enough wealth to branch off into setting up affiliates in industries such as air transport, road building and trading. Their new-found legitimacy ensures them success in the business arena as well.
Safety in Peril
The spin-off of these undercurrents has seen wealth being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The world's richest people have increased their assets from $440 billion to one trillion dollars during the past five years. This has spawned a huge underclass of people who lack the education and skills to find employment. They provide an ideal catchment area to be exploited by criminals. In India, police statistics reveal that growing numbers of unemployed young people are being sucked into crime.
This is an extremely dangerous trend, especially since crime syndicates operate beyond the jurisdiction and accountability of any one nation. No adequate framework has been developed either at the national or at the global level to regulate them. If no mechanism is put in place quickly to hound out this transnational evil, the very safety and sanity of modern society will be at stake.