Al-Ahram Weekly, Egypt
Oct 18-24 2007
Combating the dictatorship cult
Human rights and good governance should be linked to foreign
investment and aid, writes Ayman El-Amir*
Myanmar’s recent crisis, ignited by the brutal suppression of the
country’s peaceful demonstrators led by monks, rang alarm bells to
remind the world of its oldest and most sinister ailment — the
terror of dictatorship. The military crackdown on civilian protesters
demanding democratic rule was so harsh that the issue was forced
under the attention of the UN Security Council. US-led Western powers
wanted a resolution, but China balked and brandished a veto. The
council ended up with a squeamish presidential statement deploring
the violence, and the military junta in Rangoon reacted by "deeply
regreting" the statement. The Rangoon junta appeared surprised that
the august Security Council should deviate from its task of securing
international peace and security to deal with a domestic issue of law
and order. By its symbolic action, the Security Council at least
focussed the world’s attention on a problem that could indeed
endanger international peace and security.
On another front, the world has come a long way towards recognition
and punishment of the crime of genocide, particularly because of the
Holocaust. It became a designation reserved exclusively for the Nazi
genocide against Jews in Germany and in other countries it conquered
during World War II. That was how Nazi war criminals were hunted down
all over the world for over 50 years. Other hate-based mass crimes,
whether ethnic, racist or religious, were identified in Rwanda,
Srebrenica, the former Yugoslavia, and were brought to glaring light
and their perpetrators hauled before international criminal courts. A
panel of the US House of Representatives most recently adopted a
non-binding resolution that recognised the genocide of Armenians by
the Ottomans during World War I amid rebellion by Armenians to attain
independence. The Democrats now want a full House resolution. Many
other acts of genocide that were committed during the 20th century,
including US atrocities in Vietnam and the Stalinist era purges, mass
relocation of populations within the former Soviet Union and the
death of political opponents in the gulags, remain un-investigated.
That is not to mention the systematic extermination of American
Indians in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Genocide has become better defined and identified. Increased action
has been taken to punish instigators. However, the world, both
individually and collectively, has done little to explore and
document the synergy between genocide and dictatorship, which is a
very close and mutually reinforcing relationship. Dictatorship
requires total control that overrules law, suppresses opposition,
distorts issues, and misleads public opinion. It retains the tools of
power for the trusted loyalist elite and evades accountability. This
creates a perfect environment for repression, persecution and
possible genocide.
In the divided world of most of the 20th century, crimes of genocide
were committed quietly, behind the closed doors of dictatorial
regimes, with no international accountability. When they came to
international attention, the outcry that human rights activists
raised was lost in the labyrinth of foreign policy where state
sovereignty and the principle of non-interference in the internal
affairs of other countries covered up atrocities as domestic matters
that precluded international jurisdiction.
When in 1946 India raised the question of apartheid before the UN
General Assembly because of discrimination against its coloured
nationals in South Africa, the racist government in Pretoria
dismissed the matter as a purely domestic issue over which the UN had
no authority. Similarly, genocide was committed under the control of
dictatorial regimes before the eyes of a baffled world. The Khmer
Rouge regime massacred almost 1.7 million Cambodians between 1975 and
1979 without any serious intervention by the so-called international
community. Strangely enough, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia and
toppled the Pol Pot regime, the UN Credentials Committee of the 1979
General Assembly session rejected the credentials of the new
Cambodian permanent representative because he represented a
government that came to power under the Vietnamese invasion. The
representative of Pol Pot occupied the seat reserved for Cambodia
that year.
Some research institutions and NGOs concerned with the subject have
put the number of the victims of genocide and democide — those
massacred by colonial regimes — during the 20th century at
approximately 260 million people. After the establishment of the
United Nations, the end of the Cold War, the revolution in the
technology and tools of communication and under the watchful eyes of
mushrooming human rights groups, crimes of genocide became more
difficult to conceal and more likely to be prosecuted. The
International Criminal Court was established and its specially
designated subsidiaries tried several cases of genocide. Sadly, the
associated crime of dictatorship, which provides the environment for
genocide, has not come under the same rigorous inspection.
Like a chameleon, dictatorship has been adapting itself to its
international habitat. It changes colour, tactics and builds a
protective shield of alliances, making minor concessions where
necessary to maintain its core interest of totalitarian power and
perpetuity. With the exception of some crude examples like Myanmar,
the 1970s military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and
some other South American countries, modern-day dictatorship has
donned business suits but maintains the same brutal mentality that
tolerates no serious opposition. Its most lethal enemy is genuine
multi-party democracy that entails a rotation of power.
The Arab Middle East and its environs present a unique case of
dictatorship. It consists of hard- core monarchies that do not feel
apologetic and of feudal republics that feel entitled to retain at
any cost the power they usurped. Regimes in the first category rule
by the right of clannish ownership while the second category owns by
virtue of power. While in the first category he who owns rules, in
the second he who rules owns too. In both categories the peoples’
right of choice is neither a critical factor nor a determinant that
cannot be fixed. Wealth, whether oil-generated, laundered or skimmed,
is central to the hold on power. But with hundreds of billions of
dollars sitting in Western banks or frozen in real estate assets, why
do autocratic rulers insist on retaining power by false legitimacy
won through rigged elections at the expense of impoverished and
helpless nations under siege by a police state system?
One critical reason is, perhaps, that so many acts of corruption and
so many horrendous crimes have been committed by them and their
associates that they would be unsafe to allow a rotation of power
lest another regime open those cans of worms. In 1979, Pakistan’s
prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was convicted of conspiring to
kill a political opponent and was hanged. He had been deposed in 1977
by a military coup led by General Zia ul-Haq, who subsequently became
the country’s military dictator. So autocrats in the Arab region
would only abdicate power if they could be assured it will pass into
safe hands — preferably to a close member of the family. In effect,
this would be a difference in name only between republican regimes
where power is supposed to be rotated by free elections and
monarchies where inheritance is the name of the game. Regrettably,
Western democracies led by the US have placed human rights and
democratic rule on the back burner in order to advance their
self-interest in the Middle East Arab region. It is mind-boggling
that the US, which allied itself with every brutal dictator in South
America in the 1950s through the 1980s, did not learn the plain
lesson of how those countries eventually became an anti-American
leftist- leaning coalition. Led by Venezuela, the region’s
oil-producing countries are forming a new oil cartel that does not
promise to be friendly to the US.
Autocracy in the Arab Middle East has become extremely sophisticated,
deft and more oppressive, covering a fist of iron with a silk glove.
Covert dictatorship is exercising police state powers under the guise
of combating Muslim extremism. In the past, South American dictators
perpetuated their atrocities under the guise, and with US blessings,
of fighting communism. Oil and short-sighted strategic interests are
leading the US into the same cataclysm now. The US is repeating the
same mistakes it failed to learn from in South America, in Iran of
the Shah, in Vietnam and in blood- drenched Iraq. Supporting
dictatorial regimes and turning a blind eye to their atrocities is
the worst guarantee of US interests. Brutal suppression, augmented by
corruption and poverty, will lead to disastrous social upheaval that
"all the king’s horses and all the king’s men" will not be able to
control.
In imperial Rome, a magistrate was selected and granted extraordinary
powers for a limited period of time, usually not exceeding six
months, in order to deal with a temporary state crisis. He was called
a dictator, particularly in times of war or emergency. The powers the
dictator was granted were never arbitrary, nor unaccountable; they
were subject to the law and were reviewed in retrospect. The
contemporary world of more complex international relations and
extraterritorial interests requires a different paradigm. Democracy,
respect for the international principles of human rights, and the
rotation of power, along with accountability at the highest levels,
should be jealously guarded standards. The conduct of foreign policy
according to myopic interests is short-lived. Human rights and good
governance standards should be institutionalised and enforced on a
global scale in accordance with uncompromising code.
A country that is perceived to be a violator of the legitimate rights
of its own people should be cut off from the community of nations,
politically, culturally and especially economically. Aid, loans,
multilateral assistance and private investment should be linked to a
transparent record of democratic rule and respect for human rights.
The world needs to develop a non-governmental human rights rating
agency, like Moodys or Standard and Poor’s that rate the credit
worthiness of countries and financial institutions. Member states of
the United Nations should establish parallel commissions that review
the state of human rights in individual countries and recommend to
their respective governments and financial institutions human
rights-based policies in doling out foreign aid, international
assistance or investment, instead of the current narrow
interest-based aid-giving policies.
* The writer is a former correspondent for Al-Ahram in Washington,
DC. He also served as director of UN Radio and Television in New
York.