Peace Matters Index

ONLINE contents

- barbarians at the gate
- non sibi sed patriae
- chancers crooks and con men
- wanted: a new global paradigm
- iran in a calmer light
- human rights




- compled issue pdf

Rarely has democracy been so acclaimed yet so breached, so promoted yet so disrespected, so important yet so disappointing. Today, democracy has become the sine qua non of legitimacy. Few governments want to be seen as undemocratic. Yet the credentials of the claimants have not kept pace with democracy’s growing popularity. These days, even overt dictators aspire to the status conferred by the democracy label. Determined not to let mere facts stand in the way, these rulers have mastered the art of democratic rhetoric that bears little relationship to their practice of governing.

Why else would as ruthless a leader as Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov choose to stage elections? Why bother? Karimov heads a government that has imprisoned some 7,000 people for political and religious reasons, routinely tortures detainees, and as recently as 2005 massacred hundreds of protesters in Andijan. He is hardly a democrat, and he faces no real opponents in December 2007 elections because no one dares mount a serious challenge to his rule. Even a constitutional prohibition against a third seven-year presidential term has not stood in his way.

Yet this brutal president finds utility in holding electoral charades to legitimize his reign. So do, among others, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, and Vladimir Putin of Russia.

Even China has gotten into the game. In an October 2007 speech to the Communist Party Congress, President Hu Jintao used the word ‘democracy’ more than 60 times in calling for more of it within the party. Yet that has not stopped him from barring independent political parties, blocking legal efforts to uphold basic rights, and shutting down countless civil society organizations, media outlets, and websites. And there are no national elections. So what did he have in mind? The party allowed 221 candidates to contest 204 seats for its Central Committee.

The techniques used by such autocrats to tame the nettlesome unpredictability of democracy are nothing if not creative. The challenge they face is to appear to embrace democratic principles while avoiding any risk of succumbing to popular preferences. Electoral fraud, political violence, press censorship, repression of civil society, even military rule have all been used to curtail the prospect that the proclaimed process of democratization might actually lead to a popular say in government.

Part of the reason that dictators can hope to get away with such subterfuge is that, unlike human rights, ‘democracy’ has no legally established definition. The concept of democracy reflects the powerful vision that the best way to select a government and guide its course is to entrust ultimate authority to those who are subject to its rule. It is far from a perfect political system, with its risk of majoritarian indifference to minorities and its susceptibility to excessive influence by powerful elements, but as famously the ‘least bad’ form of government, in the words of Winston Churchill, it is an important part of the human rights ideal. Yet there is no International Convention on Democracy, no widely ratified treaty affirming how a government must behave to earn the democracy label. The meaning of democracy lies too much in the eye of the beholder.

By contrast, international human rights law grants all citizens the right to ‘take part in the conduct of public affairs, directly or through freely chosen representatives’ and to ‘vote’ in ‘genuine periodic elections’ with ‘universal and equal suffrage’ and ‘secret ballot’ so as to ‘guarantee[] the free expression of the will of the electors.’ It also grants a range of related rights that should be seen as essential to democracy in any robust and meaningful form, including rights protecting a diverse and vigorous civil society and a free and vibrant press, rights defending the interests of minorities, and rights ensuring that government officials are subject to the rule of law. The specificity and legally binding nature of human rights are their great strength. But when autocrats manage to deflect criticism for violating these rights by pretending to be democrats, when they can enjoy the benefits of admission to the club of democracies without paying the admission fee of respect for basic rights, the global defense of human rights is put in jeopardy. Why bother complying with so intrusive a set of rules as international human rights law when, with a bit of maneuvering, any tyrant can pass himself off as a ‘democrat’?

The misuse of the democratic name is not entirely new. The one-time German Democratic Republic (the name of the now-defunct one-party Communist state in East Germany) or today’s Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (the improbable, official name of North Korea) are prime examples. But few gave any credence to these Orwellian claims. The sad new development is how easy it has become for today’s autocrats to get away with mounting a democratic facade.

It is not that pseudo-democratic leaders gain much legitimacy at home. The local population knows all too bitterly what a farce the elections really are. At best, these leaders gain the benefit of feigned compliance with local laws requiring elections. Rather, a good part of the motivation today behind this democratic veneer stems from the international legitimacy that an electoral exercise, however empty, can win for even the most hardened dictator. Because of other interests—energy, commerce, counterterrorism—the world’s more established democracies too often find it convenient to appear credulous of these sham democrats.

Foremost has been the United States under President George W. Bush. In a troubling parallel to abusive governments around the world, the US government > has embraced democracy promotion as a softer and fuzzier alternative to defending human rights. Democracy is a metric by which the United States still measures up fairly well, but human rights are a standard by which the record of the Bush administration is deeply troubling. Talk of human rights leads to Guantanamo, secret CIA prisons, waterboarding, rendition, military commissions, and the suspension of habeas corpus. Despite the 2000 presidential elections, discussion of democracy takes place on a more comfortable terrain.

Such divorcing of democracy from the international standards that give it meaning helps to convince autocrats that mere elections, regardless of the circumstances, are sufficient to warrant the democrat label. Bush’s response to then-General Musharraf’s November 2007 declaration of ‘emergency rule’ illustrates the problem. Even after Musharraf’s effective coup and his detention of thousands of political opponents, Bush said that Musharraf had somehow not ‘crossed the line.’ Bush could hardly trumpet Musharraf’s human rights record, so he declared that Musharraf is ‘somebody who believes in democracy’ and that Pakistan was ‘on the road to democracy.’ But if, 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. 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.

Other governments, too, have treated empty elections as an excuse to re-start business as usual with dictatorships that merit denunciation, not partnership. A prime example is the treatment of Kazakhstan by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a body that comprises 56 governments from Europe and Central Asia as well as the United States and Canada. In August 2007, President Nursultan Nazarbaev staged parliamentary elections in which the OSCE found vote-counting flaws in 40 percent of the polling stations it visited. The predictable result: Nazarbaev’s party won all the seats in the lower house of parliament with a declared 88 percent of the vote, and no opposition party was said to have surpassed the 7 percent threshold needed for parliamentary representation. This fraud occurred against a backdrop of continuing, widespread human rights violations: government loyalists dominate the broadcast media, independent journalists are threatened and harassed for criticizing the president or the government, libel continues to be used as a criminal offense, and opposition activists risk imprisonment, such as Alibek Zhumbaev, currently serving a five-year prison term for insulting Nazarbaev.

But the OSCE, in evidence-be-damned fashion, claimed that the elections had ‘moved Kazakhstan forward in its evolution towards a democratic country.’ This wishful thinking was apparently designed to avoid keeping Kazakhstan from its long-sought goal of becoming the first former Soviet republic to chair the OSCE. Preoccupied by energy concerns, Germany joined Russia in supporting this inappropriate candidacy. Although the US and British governments led the opposition, they, too, ultimately wavered. In November 2007, OSCE states by consensus granted Kazakhstan the chairmanship in 2010. Of course, insisting on real democracy is not the only test of the international community’s commitment to human rights. Also of fundamental importance is its response to mass atrocities in places such as eastern Chad, Colombia, eastern Congo, the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, Iraq, Somalia, Sri Lanka, and the Darfur region of Sudan, as well as to closed societies or severe repression in countries such as Burma, China, Cuba, Eritrea, Libya, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam. But the human rights cause must be concerned not only with these severe cases but also with governments that may be slightly more open but still use repressive means to prevent any challenge to their rule. Their task is eased when mere gestures toward democracy are allowed to displace respect for the full panoply of human rights.

In 2007, democracy showed continuing vitality in, for example, Sierra Leone, Jamaica, Poland, and Australia—all countries where power alternated and opposition parties took office after elections that were widely considered free and fair. In Turkey, when the military launched a so-called email coup in an effort to block the democratically elected, moderate Islamic government from appointing one of its officials, Abdullah Gül, as president, the government called an early general election, received an overwhelming reaffirmation of its mandate, and proceeded to appoint Gül anyway. The Turkish people’s desire for democracy proved strong.

Upholding democracy also requires avoiding some of the pitfalls that have undermined recent efforts to defend it. Many established democracies have fallen victim to the tendencies to bank on the ‘democrat’ rather than democratic principles, to accept the false dichotomy that the only alternative to the despot one knows is the despot one fears, to claim that democracy could flourish even if divorced from the human rights that give it meaning, or to modulate demands for genuine democracy according to the strategic value of the democracy pretender. These tendencies must be resisted if democracy promotion is to reach its potential as a positive force for human rights.

Edited extract from
Human Rights report 2008
Human Rights Watch