A funny thing happened in Venezuela a few years ago. The South American country's elected President, Hugo Chavez, is a real left-winger of the sort never seen in U.S. politics. He condemned the U.S.'s retaliatory attack on the Taliban, al-Qaeda's protectors, after the September 11 attacks as "respond[ing] to terror with more terror", causing the U.S. to withdraw its ambassador in protest. He maintains close ties to Cuba's Communist dictator Fidel Castro. His chief economic policy is to forcibly seize the land of wealthy farm owners and distribute it to the impoverished and unemployed for no other reason than that the rich had the land and the poor did not.
When Chavez refused the offer of a loan from the International Monetary Fund and the attached requirement of extreme Laissez Faire economic policies that have proved ruinous in most countries to take these loans, El Nacional newspaper reported on an IMF declaration that the IMF would support a transition government in Venezuela if Chavez were forcibly removed from office. Shortly thereafter, in April of 2002, Chavez fired several of the state-run oil company's managers for being too capitalist, causing large-scale pro- and anti-Chavez protests in the streets. When a sniper attacked a pro-Chavez protest, killing about a dozen and leading to more factional violence, the Venezuelan army arrested Chavez and announced that he had resigned and the new President was Pedro Carmona, a business leader nowhere in the line of succession.
Here is where it begins to get funny. In a "patriotic act reaffirming and recuperating the democratic institutions and reestablishing Constitutional legitimacy" and to "guarantee respect to human rights and democratic institutions", the new "democratic transition government" decreed:
In the name of Democracy and the Constitution, Carmona had dismantled the very institutions which serve to protect these things, and granted himself the powers of a dictator. This was enough for the same army which removed Chavez in favour of Carmona to now oust Carmona and rush Chavez back into place. These events in a faraway land serve as a warning to us, to not only listen to a politician's words and promises but to also observe their actions.
The word "Democracy" is a funny word. It used to have a clear, strict meaning: rule of the majority in a popular vote. As an unknown cynic once put it, democracy is three wolves and a sheep deciding on what to have for dinner, and Winston Churchill memorably called democracy "the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried". This traditional definition of democracy has given way to a popular definition which demands democracy not only be a government of the people, but one for the people. The "three wolves and a sheep" scenario becomes impossible in the new meaning of democracy, which expects equal respect and equal rights for all the people. With that positive ideal in mind, the word is further abused to mean whatever a speaker wants it to mean, only that the listener will have happy thoughts whenever a speaker invokes the word.
It is in this context that I ponder what George W. Bush means when he says that there are two new democracies in the world in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that he is bringing democracy to the world. Is Bush speaking of the traditional definition of government by popular will, the modern definition of government for popular benefit, or the Pedro Carmona definition, which is no kind of democracy at all?
Afghanistan is a factionalized realm of independent fiefdoms controlled by warlords and the Taliban, who act as dictators over their territories. The recognized government in Kabul, backed by the U.S. and growing in power, is the exception. President Hamid Karzai was appointed by the Loya Jirga, a body comparable to the Continental Congress, in a process resembling the methods of a traditional Republic. Planned elections have been delayed several times due to the lack of security hampering voter registration efforts, but with about 65% of the voting age population finally registered, Afghanistan's first elections are scheduled for October 9th.
Iraq is a more distressing case. One of Bush's first actions upon taking control of Iraq was to cancel the civil elections that many cities had independently held to replace Saddam's appointed enforcers, instead replacing Saddam's appointees with Bush's own. After the much ballyhooed transfer of power, the Allawi government seems more concerned with supporting U.S. sovereignty than its own, defering to U.S. wishes when prior agreements had clearly granted Iraq authority in the situation. Disturbing reports from the Oregon Army National Guard 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry show that the new Iraqi government is not above torturing its own people like Saddam did. Neither the Allawi government nor the U.S. has any control over the Sunni fundamentalist controlled Falluja area in north-central Iraq or the independence-seeking Kurdish regions in the far north.
Although Iraqi elections are planned for about the time of the U.S.'s own transfer of power in January, the U.S.'s constant meddling in internal Iraqi affairs raises the question of just how free and democratic Iraq will be next year. Saddam also had elections, not that they meant anything or were in any way valid or democratic. Afghanistan may be on track to become a democracy, but to call both Afghanistan and Iraq democracies right now is analogous to counting chickens before they've hatched.
Posted by Warrior Tang at September 5, 2004 10:39 AM