Want to understand the rise of Donald Trump in America, Alexis Tsipras in Greece, and the army of anti-establishment parties now challenging political elites across the western world? Then hear these six words: “We didn’t lose a single person.”
That’s what Hillary Clinton said about the number of Americans who have died in Libya since the fall of Gaddafi. And it’s not true.
Many Americans have been killed in that country: indeed, the assassination of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. citizens in Benghazi in 2012 triggered Clinton’s 12-hour appearance before a Congressional committee charged with looking into the deaths, only last year. But their murder, long with her Congress appearance, appears forgotten.
Politicians that feel they will never be held to account and never be made to pay the price for their actions make the kind of statements Clinton made yesterday. And Congressional hearings are just spectacles when no politician or official is in the end found responsible, and none pays any price for decisions they have made. And it’s the same the world over: mainstream, establishment political elites appear able to do and say anything — and there are no consequences.
Take my country, Serbia. Last month a U.S. airstrike on the Islamic State in Libya destroyed a terrorist training camp, with 49 militants believed killed. But also amongst the casualties were two Serbian citizens — diplomat Sladjana Stankovic and Jovica Stepic, her driver. They were kidnapped by ISIS in 2015 and held for ransom after their diplomatic convoy, that had included the Serbian ambassador, came under fire near Sabratha, a city in western Libya.
Immediately after their deaths were confirmed the Serbian government revealed they had been negotiating for their release and had known where they were being held. But this information had clearly not been shared with the Americans.
Someone, perhaps many in the Serbian government, should be held responsible for the deaths of Stankovic and Stepic. Their families, and the Serbian public, have a right to know exactly what happened, and why the Americans were not told where they were being held or of the ongoing negotiations for their release. But no Serbian government leader will say any more.
This charade of accountability – in both U.S. and Serbia — leaves the families of victims without justice. And, for the public, it fuels resentment with the political establishment who they see as increasingly holding immunity from rules that apply to normal people.
This, in turn, energises new and anti-establishment candidates across the Western world: from Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in America, to Alexis Tsipras in Greece and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, propelled by voters repelled by their political elites. The alternative these candidates offer can be left wing or right wing – just so long as they stand outside their country’s mainstream political spectrum.
The same is happening in Serbia. Our Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic – once an extreme nationalist and information minister for Slobodan Milosevic – came to power on a promise that he had changed. He was longer authoritarian, believed that government should be accountable, believed in fighting corruption, believed in defending free speech and ensuring transparent investment — or so he said. Disillusioned with a decade of government by free-market liberal parties and the country’s economic plundering by their friends, voters took a chance on him.
But, once in office, Vucic has acted exactly the same as the political elite he replaced. Investment has come from the Middle East but with terms that ensures details of deals remain secret; a crackdown on the free press has ensured scrutiny is minimal; former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (no better example of the mistrusted political elite can be found) has been hired as Vucic’s senior adviser despite the PM describing him as a “criminal” for the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia when he was Milosevic’s minister. And unaccountable government continues when no Serbian politician is found culpable – or even questioned — for the events that led to the deaths of Sladjana Stankovic and Jovica Stepic in Libya.
Voters in Serbia, just as in America and across the democratic world, are tired of politicians who say one thing and do another, and who promise change but deliver just more of the same. They are tired of political establishments they believe protect themselves and their friends, and are not held to account by parliamentary committees, or by the media, or by street protest.
This is not how it has always been. Once a combination of these forces proved capable, in the case of Nixon, of removing a U.S. president. He may later have been pardoned — a perfect example of the political establishment protecting its own – but he was held to account by the people who he was elected to represent.
Today, voters seem unable to expect anything like this. So they are turning to outsiders, left and right, to mount electoral challenges against the political elite and the establishment that feed off them.
In Serbia we have elections in the Spring and for the first time a new anti-establishment party “Levica Srbije” – the Serbian Left — will offer real change, and a break from elitist parties of left and right who just offer more of the same. This November Americans seem set to choose between the anti-politician Donald Trump on the one hand and Hillary Clinton, the ultimate establishment deflector (and forgetter of deaths and responsibility over Libya) on the other. In both our countries, united by unanswered tragedies in Libya, the fight to hold our political elites responsible has begun.