Thank you so much for asking me.
Since you've asked for my druthers, I would say to put the pressure on, because until it is defined as to who owns what, you're always going to have wars. If you think about wars in developing countries, whether they be national wars or tribal wars, or violence in the streets of Rio where it is not clear who's doing what or where, whether it be drugs or prostitution...until you can identify somebody with reference to land, which is the only thing that doesn't move in the world—unless you're Dutch—you're always going to have problems. The idea is to put on more pressure.
But I'd like to take up something you mentioned about the Arab world, because it's another part of a study that we did as Peruvians, and we would have loved to have had a Canadian partner to look into it. With the Arab springtime, or what you could call the Arab revolutions, we were fascinated when this started. It was dramatic, but we were fascinated. You will all remember that. I'm sure you would all agree that if you had a look at your calendars we would in unison say that this began on December 17, 2010. You remember that on the seventeenth of December of 2010, in the small town of Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia, a street and vegetable vendor called Tarek Mohamed Bouazizi doused his body with lighter fluid, flicked the light, and lit himself up.
Now, this has been done before when people were unhappy in Middle Eastern and North African countries, but in regard to this case on the seventeenth, within the next two months a lot of people started lighting up all over the country, and people rushed into the streets. In all these Arab countries, each of which has a particular culture—you can't compare Egypt to Tunisia, and certainly not Tunisia to the Tuaregs of Libya, as they're all different realities—they all lit up and the Arab Spring started. We haven't seen a thing like that probably since the collapse of communism, but this isn't about the collapse of communism: this is about people getting into the streets and saying they're very angry.
We sent a team, which I was part of, to Tunisia to look at this. One of the things that struck us was this: with one man lighting up, a man of 26 years who was being expropriated on the streets of Sidi Bouzid by the police, why did the whole Arab nation rise? What is it that he had in common given this enormous diversity...?
Another thing we noted is that 39 other Arabs who were also street vendors lit up in just about every Arab country. As that lighting up happened, before two or three months were over all Arab people were on the streets in one way or another, and three heads of state had fallen.
Who was this guy and what did he light up precisely? We've been studying these people country by country. Here's the interesting stuff. When you ask who Mohamed Bouazizi was, whose mother and father we've talked to--I mean, it's a full-fledged study and it will be coming out in a book, and we have preliminary studies—it turns out that he was classified as unemployed. He was part of l'Association des chômeurs de Tunis. Of course when you talk to some of them, you find out they're anything but unemployed; they're fully employed, but outside the law, so they don't figure in the statistics.
Also, Tunisian statistics are pretty lax, to the point that if you have worked two hours within two weeks you are no longer unemployed. But the bottom line is that if you are unemployed, you die because you starve; none of them die and they're not starving because they're in the informal economy.
What we found out was that when Mohamed committed suicide, like all the other people who have committed suicide and everybody else that followed throughout the Middle East and North Africa, it was through expropriation, that is to say, the non-respect of their property rights, even though these were customary and informal.
It was a group of policemen who actually went...and in the case of Mohamed, we did the calculation all the way to the end on how many crates of apples, pears, bananas, and vegetables he lost. The big part was of course his electronic scale. If he wasn't able to weigh his produce, he had no way to standardize and get into the market. Worst of all, the right for him to have a stall--that would be his property right for work--was taken away, and any red tape he had initiated to title his house for use as collateral in order to get credit to buy a pickup truck that would get him closer to the agricultural market was cancelled.
When you add it all up in terms of his life and his obligations, he had been bankrupted. He had been expropriated. He was ruined. In terms of the real numbers, it was equivalent to Donald Trump losing two towers in New York.
So if you figure out that he never earned a salary, that he lived on profits, and that all his capital and property rights had been withdrawn, it becomes more understandable why he would commit suicide. Donald Trump would have done so as well, because his whole life is based on a very delicate set of rights. So that it is actually understood that this is ongoing in the Middle East, we are now going place to place in the Middle East to explain what it means not to be able to protect the things you own or not to be able to use them to create capital or credit.
Let me go back a little, because that question was very important. Why didn't Mohamed Bouazizi not simply go when he was expropriated, when he was abused, when he was kicked around? Instead of going to the governor, why didn't he go to some type of tribal organization, some type of community, to talk things out, to ask for redress, because this was inhuman?
The reply is that the west and capitalism have I think pretty much over time, uninvited by Arab governments, actually gone in and destroyed the traditional organizations that allowed people to conciliate in developing countries. In other words, to think about it in Anglo-Saxon terms, probably Tunisia is somewhere close to the times of Oliver Twist. The old stuff has been wiped aside, and what is there now is a new reality, and it's missing the institutions.
I remember a book by Karl Polanyi, written in the 1940s, explaining how British colonialism destroyed institutions in India. Right or wrong, they were destroyed. They are not there anymore, so people are lighting up and doing wars. People are trying to get organized. They don't even know what to call themselves. They call themselves unemployed when in fact they are fully employed; what happens is they are illegally employed, without any protection of their property rights.
To help these people, you have to understand that it's not a technological problem. These people are where you were when you were having wars in North America about who owned what. Were you going to allow Indian tribes to have them or not have them? Was it legitimate that George Washington bought a lot of property from the tribes when it was illegal to do so? Was that why he went to war?
It's a political definition. You have to bring in the kind of people who can help Arabs or anybody in whatever part of the world you want to help them in. Even Mr. Meles Zenawi understands that they are basically in the 19th century. It's not a technological problem. It's a question not unlike that of Poland finding out what stage of history they are in.
The difference, of course, between Poland and the Arabs, and with this I will end...I'm sorry, but it's a cultural trait to do this sort of spiralling indigenization, which I do to take time about it, but I've seen no shortcuts. In the case of Poland, these are places where they had private property before. These are people who have been living next to their western neighbours. They know what it's about. These are people who were jealous of their western neighbours all throughout the Cold War. These are people who have been victimized by the Russians.
In this other part of the world, we're all reading books about how you see that we have customs that we don't want to destroy and we're different from you. I think a lot of this has to do with making the issue rise to a political level--to the “commanding heights”, as Lenin would have said--and understanding that this is a major revolution. If you pick up the statistics we have in Libya, where we've been working for years, and in Egypt and so on, 90% of the people do have property rights, albeit illegally.
In other words, we've gone past that stage of having the rights. The question is how we get them on the books. It really doesn't matter if you do it the French way, through the registre foncier, using Roman law, or if you use Anglo-Saxon law, which has different forms of deeds. That is all secondary. The important thing is whether you are going to help them get those rights.
I believe, by the way, that you can be immensely important, because everybody looks to developed countries. Everybody looks to Canada. You're supposedly the happiest country in the world, the country where most people are satisfied. In some cases we may know more than you do, but what you say is much more important than what we say. It's a political message, which is one of the reasons that I thought it was a good idea to be here this morning.