Atossa Araxia Abrahamian writes about how Jean Ziegler has spent the past 60 years exposing how Switzerland enabled global wrongdoing.
Switzerland adopted a strategy of active obstruction, whether by adopting federal policies that precluded negotiations with other governments that might have held tax cheats accountable, by letting the Swiss banks “self-regulate”, or simply by refusing to crack down on the practice. The Swiss also benefited from a federal system that encouraged cantons to compete not only with foreign entities but with one another – and to provide clients with plenty of options.
For centuries, the Swiss had prided themselves on keeping blood and money apart: of keeping its bank vaults isolated from the upheavals of the outside world. In Ziegler, they spawned an iconoclastic figure who forced them to reckon with the moral cost. “Blood may not run down the walls of the UBS headquarters,” he told me one afternoon in June 2021. “But it’s as if it did: the relative wellbeing of Swiss people is financed by death, fear and famine. This is Ali Baba’s cave: the world’s haven. That’s unique to Switzerland.