DE TOCQUEVILLE IN AMERICA UPDATED PAGE 12

MARCH 2006

Democracy to order

BY IGNACIO RAMONET

‘THE MIDDLE EAST CAULDRON WILL SCALD US ALL’

Islam’s resistance

movement

GALERIE LELONG

KONRAD KLAPHECK: Lamento (1986)

An adviser to Israel’s prime minister, summing up its strategy after the Hamas election win, said the Palestinians should be ‘put on a diet but not starved to death’. They will be punished for practising democracy, and both the United States and the European Union endorse that punishment. Western double-talk about democracy and justice has provoked outrage in Muslim countries and encouraged resistance to foreign intervention.

BY GEORGES CORM

DEMOCRACY may have been

promoted as the best of all political systems, but it has long been a rare

form of actual government. It is difficult for any regime entirely to live up to

the democratic ideal that the strong should treat the weak well and that any abuse of

power should be genuinely and unreservedly condemned.

There are fi ve necessary criteria: open elections; the existence of an organised, free

political opposition; acceptance of the principle that power can change hands; the exist

ence of an independent judicial system; and media freedom. Even democratic states that

might claim to meet all these, such as France or Britain, for a long time denied women the

right to vote and disregarded the rights of their colonial subjects.

Despite such diffi culties, democracy has become almost universal, initially in the United

States during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson (1913-21), and then widely after the end of

the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The end of history was proclaimed, on the

grounds that there was no longer anything to prevent all nations one day attaining the twin

holy grails of a market economy and representative democracy.

But those goals have turned into indisputable dogmas, allowing President George Bush

to legitimise military action in Iraq and the use of torture in secret prisons on foreign soil,

and to justify the illegal treatment of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, condemned by a United

Nations Commission on Human Rights report and a European parliament resolution.

Despite these serious breaches, the US has no qualms about setting itself up as the global

arbiter of democratic observance. The Bush administration is in the habit of branding

opponents as undemocratic, or even as rogue states and outposts of tyranny. The only way

to change is to organise free elections. But with those free elections everything

depends upon the outcome. Hugo Chávez has been elected president of Venezuela several

times since 1998, under democratic criteria guaranteed by international observers, and

will submit again to the ballot in December 2006. Much good may it do him. The US,

which sponsored a failed coup in April 2002,

continues to attack him, calling him a danger

to democracy. Iran, Palestine and Haiti demonstrate that

it is no longer enough to be democratically elected. The Iranian election of June 2005

met with worldwide approval. A massive voter turnout was able to choose between candi

dates representing a wide range of diff erent opinions within the framework of offi cial

Islamism. The West’s favoured candidate, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, fought a brilliant campaign

and was expected to win. Nobody mentioned a nuclear threat. But everything changed

abruptly after the victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has made a series of unac

ceptable pronouncements about Israel. Iran is being swiftly demonised. Although

it has signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and denies any military nuclear

ambitions, France’s foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, recently accused it of pursuing

a “secret military nuclear programme” (1). The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, has

already forgotten last year’s election and has asked Congress for $75m to promote democ

racy in Iran. Much the same has happened in Palestine

(see Islam’s resistance movement, right). The US and the European Union insisted upon

genuinely democratic elections monitored by an army of foreign observers, only to reject the

result on the grounds that they don’t like the winners, the Islamo-nationalist Hamas move

ment, which has been responsible in the past for attacks on Israeli civilians.

In Haiti the international community was desperate to prevent the election of René

Préval because of his association with the former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide,

democratically elected but overthrown in 2004. But despite their best eff orts, Préval was

elected president on 7 February. Winston Churchill said that “democracy is

the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from

time to time”. What seems to upset people now is their inability to predetermine the result of

an election. If only democracies could be made to measure and guaranteed to fi t.

TRANSLATED BY DONALD HOUNAM

(1) Le Monde , 16 February 2006.

ALTHOUGH the world’s political

observers were surprised by the landslide victory of Hamas in

the Palestinian parliamentary elections in January, it should have been

foreseen as inevitable given the disregard for international law and human rights in

the Palestinian territories that have been occupied by Israel since 1967.

The inhabitants of East Timor have wrested independence from Indonesia, and Bosnia

and Kosovo have benefi ted from major international action to protect their peoples and

grant autonomy as a prelude to independence. Meanwhile the Palestinians have seen what

is left of their territory consumed by expanding settlements, and the illegal construction

of the wall that is turning the West Bank into a huge collective prison (1). Gaza was evacu

ated ceremoniously by its 8,000 settlers and the Israeli army, but security has still not been

restored: every day Israeli air strikes cause more civilian casualties.

No one dares invoke the peace process launched in Madrid in October 1991 or the

Oslo accords in 1993 between the Palestine

Liberation Organisation and Israel. Yet it

is claimed that a peace process still exists, although it is now no more than that faded

United States road map, endorsed by the European Union, the United Nations and Rus

sia. Claims that the Hamas election victory meant the end of any peace process seemed

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

Saudi Arabia: there is less oil under there than we need page 3

Tunisia: independent for 50 years, but never really free page 4

Belarus: the broadband opposition versus Lukashenko page 6

Madagascar: a business president and his corporate country page 8

United States: the state of the unions is divided page 10

shocking, since in fact “the peace process” has

no real, external existence. Hamas was bound to win the election out

right. The Palestinian Authority (PA) had long since thrown away all its advantages, making

every possible concession to Israel and the international community that supports Israel:

the PA had recognised Israel without reciprocal recognition of the Palestinian right to

statehood, declared the PLO charter no longer valid, renounced armed resistance to the

occupation, and de facto accepted the settlements and their further expansion.

Israeli intransigence left the PLO at a dead end. The intifada resumed in September

2000, leading to reoccupation of most of the West Bank and Gaza by the Israeli army and

destruction of most of the PA’s infrastructure, which had been substantially funded by

the EU. Living standards fell drastically as military checkpoints made the movement of

Palestinians increasingly diffi cult within the meagre territory left to them. With the Palestinians abandoned to their fate, the PLO bureaucracy sank into inef

fi ciency and corruption, denounced by all western governments, which blamed the

PLO leader, Yasser Arafat. He was in political, and often physical, quarantine in his Ram

allah headquarters. Hamas continued the armed struggle through suicide bombings in

Continued on page 2

Wal-Mart: a movie about the high cost of low prices page 11

India: the history of silent but not powerless people page 12

Pier Paolo Pasolini: remembering a great rebel fi lmmaker page 14

Climate change conference: too little and too late page 15

Behzad Yaghmaian’s dispatch from two hostile borders page 16