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"It is time to stop selling democracy on the cheap
and to start substituting a broader and more meaningful vision of
the concept that incorporates all human rights."
"Too
many western governments insist on elections and leave it at
that.
They don't press governments on the key human
rights issues that make democracy function - a free press,
peaceful assembly, and a functioning civil society that can
really challenge power."
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Western
governments give false democracies a pass
Jim
Lobe
IPS
01 Feb
08
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41021
Western
governments, eager to pursue their political or economic
interests, too often reward self-proclaimed and flawed
"democracies" that clearly abuse the political and
civil rights of their citizens, according to the latest edition
of Human Rights Watch's annual "World Report" released
here Thursday.
The mere holding of elections does not make
a state democratic, according to the report. Yet both the United
States and the European Union (EU) have used such exercises to
justify aid and closer ties to friendly or potentially useful
governments, according to the report.
"It seems
Washington and European governments will accept even the most
dubious election so long as the 'victor' is a strategic or
commercial ally," said HRW director Kenneth Roth, author of
the report's introduction.
In doing so, they undermine
the causes of both democracy and human rights, according to the
569-report.
"(I)f dictators can get away with
calling themselves 'democrats,' they will have acquired a
powerful tool for deflecting pressure to uphold human rights,"
Roth wrote. "It is time to stop selling democracy on the
cheap and to start substituting a broader and more meaningful
vision of the concept that incorporates all human rights."
One of the most dramatic examples in 2007 was U.S.
President George W. Bush's endorsement of Pakistani President
Gen. Pervez Musharraf as "somebody who believes in
democracy" and his government as having put the country "on
the road to democracy", even after the former army chief
declared "emergency rule", fired the supreme court, and
arrested thousands of opposition activists.
"(I)f,
unlike human rights law, 'the road to democracy' permits locking
up political opponents, dismissing independent judges, and
silencing the independent press, it is easy to see why tyrants
the world over are tempted to believe that they, too, might be
eligible," according to Roth.
"As such unworthy
claimants as the leaders of Egypt, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, and
Nigeria wrap themselves in the democracy mantle with scant
international objection, the concept of democracy gets cheapened,
its human rights component cast aside."
The report,
which covers significant human rights developments during 2007 in
75 countries worldwide, drew particular attention to the
worsening humanitarian crisis in Somalia and the Ogaden region of
Ethiopia and the continuing violence in the Darfur region of
Sudan where it said the Khartoum government bears much of the
blame.
In Asia, it noted the use of deadly force by
Burma's military government to put down peaceful protests by
monks, students, and ordinary citizens last summer; and the heavy
fighting and rising civilian toll in the longstanding civil
conflict in Sri Lanka.
It also stressed that this
summer's Olympic Games in Beijing offered a key opportunity for
the international community to push Chinese leaders to improve
their human rights record.
Roth's introduction, however,
effectively revives a generation-long debate between the
traditional human rights movement, which has long argued that
respect for internationally defined human rights would inevitably
lead to the creation of democratic institutions, and mainly
neo-conservative, "pro-democracy" activists who have
historically placed a premium on elections as the launching pad
for democratic reform.
That debate was launched in the
early 1980s when elections held in violence-torn El Salvador were
used by the administration of former President Ronald Reagan to
justify lavishing hundreds of millions of dollars in mostly
military aid to support a government whose security forces were
killing hundreds of suspected opponents each month.
Elliott
Abrams, who was Reagan's assistant secretary of state for human
rights at the time, currently serves as Bush's deputy national
security advisor for global democracy strategy.
In his
essay entitled "Despots Masquerading as Democrats",
Roth implicitly takes up the old debate, noting that, while
international human rights law is codified in various
international covenants and guarantees basic democratic
principles, such as universal and equal suffrage, freedom of the
press, assembly, and the rights of minorities, no comparable
document lays out the basic conditions for democracy.
"The
meaning of democracy lies too much in the eye of the beholder,"
he writes, thus making it ripe for misuse and misrepresentation
both by dictators and western governments that support them.
"It's now too easy for autocrats to get away with
mounting a sham democracy," Roth said. "That's because
too many western governments insist on elections and leave it at
that. They don't press governments on the key human rights issues
that make democracy function - a free press, peaceful assembly,
and a functioning civil society that can really challenge power."
Particularly problematic has been the Bush administration
itself which offers a "troubling parallel to abusive
governments around the world". Its embrace of "democracy
promotion as a softer and fuzzier alternative to defending human
rights" is echoed in its own "deeply troubling"
human rights record - waterboarding and other "enhanced"
interrogation methods, denial of habeas corpus, secret detentions
- even as it has mostly retained democratic processes.
Moreover, the administration's own efforts to justify the
Iraq invasion in terms of democracy promotion has handed
dictators a whole new arsenal of reasons for resisting pressure
for reform, not least the fear of the kind of chaos that was
unleashed by Washington's occupation, according to the report.
Still, most autocrats remain eager to don the democratic
mantle through "elections" whose flaws or unfairness
western governments are often too willing to ignore.
Flaws
documented in the report include fraud, as in recent elections in
Chad, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe;
control of the electoral machinery, as in Azerbaijan, Bahrain,
Malaysia, and Thailand; and blocking opposition candidates, as in
Belarus, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Israel in the occupied territories,
Libya, Turkmenistan, and Uganda.
Governments have also
resorted to political violence (Cambodia, Democratic Republic of
Congo, Ethiopia, Lebanon, and Zimbabwe); curbs on media and civil
society (Russia and Tunisia); and undermining the rule of law
(China and Pakistan) to ensure the election results they prefer.
Western reaction - or lack of it - to election abuses,
moreover, has naturally led to understandable charges of double
standards, Roth noted. "These days,.. the U.S. government's
vigorous criticism of democratic shortcomings tends to be
reserved mainly for longtime adversaries or pariahs, such as
Syria, Burma or Cuba. Washington has largely exempted such allies
as Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, or Ethiopia, while its short-lived
pressure on others, such as Egypt or Jordan, has waned."
Despite a deteriorating human rights record, including
"extraordinary brutality" in suppressing an insurgency
in the Ogaden, Ethiopia, he noted, is the U.S.'s biggest aid
beneficiary in sub-Saharan Africa and a key ally in the "war
on terror". It is also one of the EU's top aid recipients.
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