|
Win hearts with democracy by Abid Ullah Jan December 4, 2002 Being a dictator in Muslim countries still comes with the job security as it used to be. Undoubtedly, tyrants who once seemed invincible started losing their grip since 2000, especially those who hid their despotic tendencies behind the fig leaf of democratic process. But not in Muslim states. At the ballot box, in courtrooms and on the streets, once-obedient subjects have begun a widespread revolt. Again, not in Muslim states, at the horrible cost of losing hearts and minds of Muslim masses. After a blood-soaked decade in power, Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic was toppled in October 2000 in a revolution triggered by his landslide defeat in elections. A few weeks later, Peru's Alberto Fujimori tendered his resignation under the most humiliating circumstances. Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was voted out after 71 years of virtual one-party rule. A year earlier, public protests forced Nigeria's military rulers to submit to elections, bringing civilian rule for the first time in 15 years. After public humiliation of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Reed Brody, advocacy director of Human Rights Watch, a New York human rights group said: "What we see now is dictators can hide, but they cannot run." There are exceptions to this trend and interestingly almost all of them in the Muslim countries, where optimism about fledgling democracies continues to be overshadowed by a handful of repressive rulers, particularly Hosni Mubarak and Pervez Musharraf. The reason these two stand out is that the rest have justified themselves in the form of one family rule, but these two are stealing in the name of democracy. The stronger the support from the West, the stronger the hold dictators have, especially in the countries on the US hit list. Culture and civilization seem to matter here. The tyrants most susceptible to collapse, it seems, are predominantly non-Muslims and surrounded by countries already on the road to democracy. Most entrenched are dictatorships in countries identified by the US analysts are the future foes in a “clash of civilizations”. The influences, according to human rights and democratization studies, that contribute to the collapse of dictatorships seem not to be working in Muslim countries due to suitability of dictatorship to the warriors of the “war on terrorism”. Despite opposition movements having increased access to information – including from other successful liberation movements – dictators do not tend to become isolated and out of touch. Dictators are now playing the game of running democracies. Authoritarian countries seeking foreign investment and integration into the world's financial and political organizations are feeling no pressure to at least pretend to conform to human rights and governance norms. Pressure on non-Muslim governments to achieve at least the appearance of legitimacy has forced leaders like Zimbabwe's Mugabe to submit to elections – the vehicle for Milosevic's and Fujimori's downfalls. US and its allies, who proclaim to honor democracy and freedom, have embraced dictators only because they seem to serve American interests. Like his predecessors, President Bush is falling for the illusion that tyrants make great allies. In some cases, there may appear to be no practical alternative. It would have been much more difficult to dislodge the Taliban from Afghanistan without the cooperation of Gen. Musharraf. Washington's longstanding ties to the Saudi royal family have ensured a steady flow of oil to the West for most of the last 60 years. However, should oil and imaginary enemies of the US dictate the fate of suffering humanity at the hand of these tyrants? There must be a difference between making alliances of convenience and uncritically working with dictators. Muting its support for democracy and human rights leads to more and more anti-Westernism in these societies. The autocratic friends of Washington are simply turning their countries into breeding grounds for anti-American hostility. Violent feelings and subsequent terrorism will retreat only where democracy advances, not where autocrats muzzle political expression or manufacture votes to project an image of democratically elected leaders abroad. The latest political developments in Pakistan in particular are quite discouraging. Anyone may call it a democracy but not this scribe who sees, apart from many legal complications, front-page pictures in newspapers of an elected prime minister taking lessons from a president in military uniform. This is the direct result of what Washington Post described in its August 25, 2002 editorial as undoing the “sense of balance” required for promoting democracy in Muslim countries. The editorial says: “The State Department's effort to get that balance right last week was pretty much undone by President Bush, who in an off-the-cuff comment conveyed a sense that democracy in the South Asian country [Pakistan] isn't all that important to him.” The cost of cozying up to dictators in this fashion is far more than the capacity of both the suffering masses in Muslim states and supporters of autocracies in the West. Meeting the West's short-term military and diplomatic needs should not require abandoning its democratic and human rights principles. As far Pakistan is concerned, it is not all over yet. Putting pressure on Musharraf to withdraw LFO and resign from the position of Chief of Army Staff may do the much-needed trick, restoring democracy in Pakistan. For elsewhere there could be other suitable strategies, which alone, in the end, would pave the way for winning hearts and minds of Muslim masses. The author is Executive Director of the Independent Center for Strategic Studies and Analysis (ICSSA) in Pakistan. His latest book “A War on Islam?” has just been released in UK.
|