I started reading the International Herald Tribune recently. It’s something new for me but I found I really enjoy their articles because they have lots of different kinds of essays and perspectives and not just news. Here are two articles I thought was interesting:
Democracy: The problem with implanting an ideal
and
Human Rights Watch: The trials of China’s Tibetans
-It’s below on the site, well now you know why I don’t link out my news articles.
(The other thing I am going to do for myself for being 30 is I am going to start buying the Economist. I used steal Dad’s copy every week, but it occurred to me I have left home for 12 years now, and I think it’s just time to pick them up myself especially when we don’t live in the same country.)
the International Herald Tribune
The problem with implanting an ideal
By Steven Erlanger/NYT
Monday, February 16, 2004
Arkady Volsky, a Soviet apparatchik who maneuvered elegantly, for a time, in the new Russia, liked to make his political points hidden in the safety of a jest. “People say that Russia should become like Sweden,” he once said in Moscow. “Or like China. Or like America. But the problem is that we don’t have enough Swedes. We don’t have enough Chinese. We don’t have enough Americans.”
Democracy, in other words, grows out of a nation’s history and experiences. It can’t be inserted like a silicone implant or put on like a new hat. Nor can it be imposed, even by the most well meaning or well armed.
Democracy can be nurtured, even fertilized. But one need only read a few pages of Churchill’s “History of the English-Speaking Peoples” to realize how tender a plant it is, and how aberrant. And how much it needs protective institutions, like independent courts and just laws, in which to flourish.
Does this state the obvious? Even so, the United States and the European Union have spent billions in the name of democratization wherever their armies have roamed, and in lots of places where they have not.
Democracy, a wonderful idea, scarcely needs to be force-fed; but from Iraq to Haiti, Russia to Romania, Belgrade to Kosovo many people who embrace it haven’t any real idea of what makes it work, or the kind of collective understanding of the collective good that grows over centuries and is essential to making democracy self-limiting.
The selling and implanting of democracy face three essential problems: institution-building, which requires time, money and commitment; making that effort palatable in a foreign land, so it is not seen as imperial; and making the effort sustainable in countries where other interests – wars on terrorism or drugs, or maintenance of regional stability – trump Americans’ ability to face down an illiberal state.
“The principal struggle in all these societies is about modernization,” said Fareed Zakaria, author of “The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad.”
“The idea that you can just hold elections while everything else remains feudal, medieval, means you won’t get democracy but some perversion of it.”
Stephen Kotkin, a professor of European and Asian history at Princeton University and director of Russian studies there, said simply, “It’s always about the quality of governing institutions and how they work on the ground.” When Boris Yeltsin took over Russia, Kotkin pointed out, there were 6,000 judges, trained in the old regime, and a quarter-million members of the KGB.
“How do you get rule of law?” he asked. “Only if the number of judges goes up and the number of agents down.” In 12 years the number of judges has tripled, to 18,000. But about 200,000 agents of the secret police remain.
By contrast, when the United States won its independence, there were more lawyers than bureaucrats. The society was stronger than the state; there was a foundation of individual rights and private property. Over time, as slaves were freed and women and blacks won civil and property rights, the liberal order has become more democratic.
But the effort to democratize an illiberal order – a Russia, a former Yugoslavia, a Haiti, an Iraq – lays elections over societies without the rooted institutions that protect democrats and democratic values. Elections by themselves don’t translate into parliamentary rule or civilian control or an independent judiciary or fair taxes or protections for private property and minorities.
The result, often, is an intellectual class beholden to the state or co-opted by it, while the state suborns or seizes or paralyzes any independent institution that becomes profitable or popular. Just look at Russia.
When a form of democracy first came to infect the Soviet Communist Party, it blew the system apart. Free speech was used for movements, like environmentalism, that were thin disguises for popular nationalism, ethnic resentment and collective action.
Democracy proved destabilizing and pulled the tottering country down. The resulting anarchy shook a people historically terrified of weak central control.
Now President Vladimir Putin of Russia, the icy former spy, is about to win re-election by virtual acclamation, after jailing a rich political opponent and shutting down or confiscating independent newspapers, because he has provided a strong and respectable hand.
In the former Yugoslavia, the effort to escape from Slobodan Milosevic’s grip has produced a divided Bosnia that votes on ethnic grounds, with moderates squeezed out. In Kosovo, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United Nations have presided over a kind of gangster democracy, where minority rights are protected only in principle. And in Belgrade, the Westernized democrats are split and tainted, ultranationalists have done well, and a moderate nationalist, Vojislav Kostunica, may become prime minister with the support of Milosevic’s Socialist Party.
Haiti has been independent about as long as the United States, so is largely untouched by feelings of anticolonialism. But Haitians can resent patronizing U.S. efforts to teach them about democracy, as when they are told that their elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, has a disturbing tendency to terrorize the opposition.
The problems of the ideology of democracy are vivid in Iraq. The leader of the majority Shiite Muslims, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, is demanding direct elections immediately, before a constitution is written, using the Americans’ slogan against them.
The Americans, pushed by insurgency and terrorism and their allies to hand back sovereignty to Iraqis by July 1, are caught up in their own contradictions. They have had to appeal to the United Nations and its emissary, Lakhdar Brahimi, to try to convince Sistani that the world thinks direct elections now would be a mistake.
Afghanistan is almost a better model. There, the United Nations, backed by the Americans, is trying to build democracy on an indigenous model of representation, the council of leaders (loya jirga), and to modernize it. Not just to promote elections, but to institutionalize pluralism and an existing form of federalism.
Creating working democracies took 400 years in the West and 40 years in East Asia, said Zakaria, who is the editor of Newsweek International. “Now we want it in four months in Iraq.” That is why he has always supported UN involvement there, he said. “They have the staying power, and they are not seen as colonial.”
Arkady Volsky used to tell another joke, this one about hope and progress. There were two economists, an optimist and a pessimist. The pessimist said: “Everything is terrible. It can’t get any worse.”
The optimist said: “Yes, it can.”
The New York Times
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The trials of China’s Tibetans
Human rights
By Mickey Spiegel (IHT)
Tuesday, February 17, 2004
Human rights
NEW YORK China’s lines in the sand are not hard to find – and on certain issues the leadership doesn’t care how hard it tramples on human rights to make certain the line stays firm. Tibet is one of those issues.
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Recent pretensions to the rule of law notwithstanding, China has a long history of using criminal charges to silence Tibetan activists. Tenzin Delek, a well-respected lama from a predominantly Tibetan community in Sichuan province, is a prime example.
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In December 2003, Tenzin Delek was sentenced to death, suspended for two years, on unproven allegations that he took part in a series of bombings. If he “behaves” in prison, he will be spared death and spend the rest of his life behind bars. His alleged co-conspirator, Lobsang Dondrup, was executed on Jan. 26, 2003, immediately after both men’s appeals were turned down.
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The trials were closed on the grounds that state secrets were involved. No trial documents or any of the evidence presented have been made available. The court was neither independent nor impartial, and the defendants were denied access to independent legal counsel.
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Both before and after the trial, local Communist Party organs publicly denounced Tenzin Delek for destroying national harmony and for hiding under the cloak of religion to engage in “terrorist” activities, though no evidence of these activities has ever been produced.
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In early February, Chinese authorities finally disclosed Tenzin Delek’s whereabouts – Chuandong No. 3 Prison, a high security facility in Dazu county, more than 600 kilometers from his home. Contrary to China’s own rules, he is in a facility too far removed for easy access by his family and where word of his treatment and condition will not leak to the community he represents.
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Tenzin Delek’s arrest is in many ways the culmination of a decade of renewed repression of activist Tibetans. In 1994, China tightened the screws after increased calls for independence, a series of large-scale political and economic protests. China moved once again to aggressive sinicization of Tibetan areas and a crackdown on Tibetans’ unique forms of religious expression.
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China turned the management of monasteries over to non-religious authorities or loyal monks and restricted the number of monasteries and the number of monks in each.
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A patriotic education campaign started in the monasteries. Monks were required to renounce the Dalai Lama, support the Chinese-chosen Panchen Lama and sign statements affirming that Tibet was always a part of China. Refusal to sign meant expulsion from the monastery and no chance of joining another.
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As implementation of the policies moved eastward from the Tibetan Autonomous Region to predominately Tibetan communities in the Chinese provinces of Sichuan, Qinghai, Gansu, and Yunnan, monks such as Tenzin Delek were identified as obstacles. He, for one, went on building monasteries, training monks, and preaching the Dalai Lama’s creed of Tibetan autonomy. He took on social work and institution building to meet the social and economic needs of his community. In short, he symbolized the competing power of monastic influence and a distinct Tibetan cultural identity.
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When Tenzin Delek became a target of officialdom, local residents took part in an unprecedented march to the county seat and organized a massive petition drive. Their message was simple: Tenzin Delek did nothing wrong and broke no law. As one supporter put it, “He took care of the needy, preserved the Tibetan language and instructed us on how to conduct our lives, and helped us stop gambling and drinking. If you must arrest him, come and arrest us, too.”
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Local officials took them at their word. Police interrogated 60 people. At least six were sentenced to terms ranging between one and seven years. At least two remain locked up. Over 100 fled the community. Some went into hiding.
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The local community is quiet now. Chinese officials say residents have learned that Tenzin Delek was a charlatan, that he used religion to cover his black deeds.
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The reality is that local residents know it has become too dangerous to continue to assert their rights. They have asked the international community to take up their cause, not just for the sake of Tenzin Delek’s freedom, but to ensure that Tibetans have the rights to speak their minds without facing persecution, to organize on their own behalf, and to preserve the cultural identity that so many in the West and elsewhere admire so much. Unfortunately, the silence of western governments in recent years has been deafening.
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The writer is a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch.
Human rights
Yan Sham-Shackleton Online 