President Bush and Vice President Cheney, both former oil-company executives, have long tried to tell us this war(Iraq War) was about terrorism, about weapons of mass destruction, about bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people, about anything but oil.
Said Mr. Bush: “We cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
One of the starkest examples of U.S. priorities came during the eruption of looting that followed the fall of Baghdad. With violence and chaos all about, American troops were ordered to protect one particularly treasured target — the Iraqi Oil Ministry.
Being a Western oil giant with a no-bid contract in Iraq is a prize, yes. But at what cost? …[MORE >>]
With its expansion ever since the end of the cold war, the European Union has been increasingly projecting itself as a moral force in global affairs. It has called itself a community of values and has been tirelessly repeating to would-be members that full embrace of democracy and human and minority rights is the only way into the club.
No one has learned this refrain better than eager candidates from the Western Balkans. There, the idea of joining the European Union has been put on a pedestal. Europe symbolizes everything that is good, as opposed to the wicked backwardness of Balkan imperfection. Countries there need to constantly strive to democratize and reform in hope that they can one day join.
As much as this idea is unreservedly accepted, it appears that it is not fully corroborated by facts on the ground. Some of the countries in the (geographic) Balkans that seem to have very serious issues with respect of minority rights are in fact European Union member states.
Both Greece and Bulgaria adamantly refuse to recognize their Macedonian minority. Both countries have lost cases before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. They continue to stubbornly refuse to comply with the court’s decisions to allow the registration of the political parties of their Macedonian minorities. At the same time they do not have a problem using their leverage as members of the European Union to impose unprincipled conditions on Macedonia. Greece has already made a name for itself doing just that. Bulgaria shows signs it might take the same road.
Last month Greece vetoed Macedonia’s entry into NATO over the name dispute. Athens opposes the use of the name “Macedonia” by Skopje, as Greece claims it is exclusive part of its cultural heritage. Greece threatened it would also block Macedonia in the European Union unless a solution to the name dispute is found that is to its liking. Greece’s move pushed Macedonia into political crisis. The government called early elections.
Europe has been continuously labeling Turkey (non-European Union state) as a rogue with regards to human rights standards, but (the few) Armenians in Turkey have their churches and schools. Greece’s denial goes so far that it does not even allow the free self-determination of the Macedonian minority, let alone start to discuss standards in education, use of mother tongue, or political participation. Last month the European Free Alliance, a European political party, staged an event in the European Parliament to protest this discrimination in Greece and called the Macedonian minority there one of the “last unrecognized minorities in Europe.”
In Albania (non-European Union state), often described as the most backward country in Europe, the small Macedonian minority freely votes their own and has a mayor in the region of Mala Prespa. In Bulgaria, a novel member of the European community of values, around a hundred members of the unrecognized political party of the Macedonian minority O.M.O. Ilinden Pirin were called by the police for “talks” last week, because they engaged in organizing a small historic commemoration. A classical tactic of police intimidation.
Trying to play an honest broker and stabilize the Balkans, the United States pushed hard to get Macedonia into NATO but could not fight the Greek veto. In the process even Washington got entangled in the primitive Balkan nationalisms that simply refuse to accept that people are free to declare as they wish.
State Department official Daniel Fried during his recent visit to Athens had to argue with the Greeks over this purportedly basic human entitlement. His counterparts reportedly told him there was no such thing as Macedonians. His answer, rephrased, involved something like “Oh, but I was there last week. I saw them.”
State Department spokespeople get into semantic discussions on a regular basis with a legendary Greek journalist at press briefings over whether there is a Macedonian identity, nation, or language.
For Greeks, Macedonians are “Slavs” who are stealing Greece’s history by calling themselves Macedonians. For the Bulgarians, they are Bulgarian kin who have been brainwashed during Tito’s Yugoslavia, and think they are Macedonian, but are actually Bulgarian.
The European Union has been way too condoning of Greek discriminatory demands pointed against Macedonia. Back in 1992 it adopted an infamous Lisbon document that said the new country could not use the name “Macedonia” and it postponed its recognition. It softened over time in view of reality. Macedonia was recognized by the United Nations in 1993, under the provisional name of “former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” (FYROM). Over the years the European Union has not showed a sign of willingness to deal constructively with the issue. Only last week one of its committees had to change in a document all reference to “Macedonian language” or “Macedonian culture” to “the language of FYROM” and so forth, in face of Greek pressure.
The bottom line is that one should be free to declare as she or he feels. That is the substance of the right to free expression of identity. Restrictions to this end, whatever the pretext or ideology, are limitations of freedom and serious infringement of democratic standards. If on top of that the people subject to such restrictions are made to fear to speak their language in public, or have no schools for their kids in their mother tongue, or even fear persecution, for them the society they live in is not democratic.
One must be free to declare as he or she wants. The same way the European Union promotes democracy abroad, it needs to do it in its own yard. If judicial action is not enough and it obviously isn’t, Brussels must take more-decisive political action and demand that its members recognize minorities.
Clinton’s Two-State Two-Step: Making Florida and Michigan’s delegates a cause for democracy and feminism makes a mockery of both.
Columnist - Harold Meyerson On Saturday, when the Rules Committee of the Democratic National Committee meets to determine the fate of Florida and Michigan’s delegations to this summer’s convention, it will have some company. A group of Hillary Clinton supporters has announced it will demonstrate outside.
That Clinton has impassioned supporters, many of whom link her candidacy to the feminist cause, hardly qualifies as news.
And it’s certainly true that along the campaign trail Clinton has encountered some outrageously sexist treatment, just as Barack Obama has been on the receiving end of bigoted treatment. (Obama has even been subjected to anti-Muslim bigotry despite the fact that he’s not Muslim.) But somehow, a number of Clinton supporters have come to identify the seating of Michigan and Florida not merely with Clinton’s prospects but with the causes of democracy and feminism — an equation that makes a mockery of democracy and feminism.
Clinton herself is largely responsible for this absurdity. Over the past couple of weeks, she has equated the seating of the two delegations with African Americans’ struggle for suffrage in the Jim Crow South, and with the efforts of the democratic forces in Zimbabwe to get a fair count of the votes in their presidential election.
Somehow, I doubt that the activists opposing Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe would appreciate this equation.
But the Clintonistas who have called Saturday’s demonstration make it sound as if they’ll be marching in Selma in support of a universal right to vote. The DNC, says one of their Web sites, “must honor our core democratic principles and enfranchise the people of Michigan and Florida.”
Had Florida and Michigan conducted their primaries the way the other 48 states conducted their own primaries and caucuses — that is, in accord with the very clear calendar laid down by the DNC well before the primaries began — then Clinton’s marchers would be utterly justified in their claims. But when the two states flouted those rules by moving their primaries outside the prescribed time frame, the DNC, which gave neither state a waiver to do so, decreed that their primaries would not count and enjoined all presidential candidates from campaigning in those states. Obama and John Edwards complied with the DNC’s dictates by removing their names from the Michigan ballot. Clinton did not.
Seating Michigan in full would mean the party validates the kind of one-candidate election (well, 1.03, to give Dennis Kucinich, Chris Dodd and Mike Gravel, who also remained on the ballot, their due) that is more common in autocracies than democracies. It would mean rewarding the one serious candidate who didn’t remove her name from the ballot when all her rivals, in deference to the national party rules, did just that.
What’s particularly outrageous is that the Clinton campaign supported the calendar, and the sanctions against Michigan and Florida, until Clinton won those states and needed to have their delegations seated.
Last August, when the DNC Rules Committee voted to strip Florida (and Michigan, if it persisted in clinging to its date) of its delegates, the Clinton delegates on the committee backed those sanctions. All 12 Clinton supporters on the committee supported the penalties. (The only member of the committee to vote against them was an Obama supporter from Florida.) Harold Ickes, a committee member, leading Clinton strategist and acknowledged master of the political game, said, “This committee feels very strongly that the rules ought to be enforced.” Patty Solis Doyle, then Clinton’s campaign manager, further affirmed the decision. “We believe Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina play a unique and special role in the nominating process,” she said, referring to the four states that the committee authorized to hold the first contests. “And we believe the DNC’s rules and its calendar provide the necessary structure to respect and honor that role. Thus, we will be signing the pledge to adhere to the DNC-approved nominating calendar.”
Not a single Clinton campaign official or DNC Rules Committee member, much less the candidate herself, said at the time that the sanctions imposed on Florida or Michigan were in any way a patriarchal plot or an affront to democratic values. The threat that these rules posed to our fundamental beliefs was discovered only ex post facto — the facto in question being Clinton’s current need to seat the delegations whose seatings she had opposed when she thought she’d cruise to the nomination.
Clinton’s supporters have every right to demonstrate on Saturday, of course. But their larger cause is neither democracy nor feminism; it’s situational ethics.
To insist otherwise is to degrade democracy and turn feminism into the last refuge of scoundrels.
About The Author: Harold Meyerson is a weekly columnist for The Washington Post, writing mainly about politics. His column appears on Wednesdays. Meyerson is executive editor of the American Prospect as well as a member of the editorial board of Dissent. From 1989 to 2001, he was executive editor of the L.A. Weekly. From 1991 to 1995, Meyerson hosted the weekly show “Real Politics” on the public radio station KCRW in Sanata Monica, Calif. He is a frequent guest on television and radio talk shows and has been a regular columnist for The Post since 2003. He is the author of “Who Put The Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz?” (1995), a biography of Broadway lyricist Yip Harburg.
The United States is one of the last remaining land empires. That it is made the butt of opprobrium and odium is hardly surprising, or unprecedented. Empires - Rome, the British, the Ottomans - were always targeted by the disgruntled, the disenfranchised and the dispossessed and by their self-appointed delegates, the intelligentsia.
Yet, even by historical standards, America seems to be provoking blanket repulsion.
The Pew Research Center published in December 2002 a report titled “What the World Thinks in 2002″. “The World”, was reduced by the pollsters to 44 countries and 38,000 interviewees. Two other surveys published last year - by the German Marshall Fund and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations - largely supported Pew’s findings.
The most startling and unambiguous revelation was the extent of anti-American groundswell everywhere: among America’s NATO allies, in developing countries, Muslim nations and even in eastern Europe where Americans, only a decade ago, were lionized as much-adulated liberators.
Four years later, things have gotten even worse.
Between March and May 2006, Pew surveyed 16,710 people in Britain, China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, Spain, Turkey and the United States.
Only 23% of Spaniards had a positive opinion of the USA, down from 41% the year before. A similar drop was evinced in India (from 71% to 56%), Russia (from 52% o 43%), Indonesia (from 38% to 30%), and Turkey (from 23% to 12%). In Britain, America’s putative ally, support was down by one third from 2002, to 50% or so. Declines were noted in France, Germany, and Jordan, somewhat offset by marginal rises in China and Pakistan.
Two thirds of Russians and overwhelming majorities in 13 out of 15 countries regarded the conduct of the USA in Iraq as a greater threat to world peace that Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The distinction formerly made between the American people and the Bush administration is also eroding. Majorities in only 7 of 14 countries had favorable views of Americans.
“People around the world embrace things American and, at the same time, decry U.S. influence on their societies. Similarly, pluralities in most of the nations surveyed complain about American unilateralism.”- expounded the year 2002 Pew report.
Yet, even this “embrace of things American” is ambiguous.
Violently “independent”, inanely litigious and quarrelsome, solipsistically provincial, and fatuously ignorant - this nation of video clips and sound bites, the United States, is often perceived as trying to impose its narcissistic pseudo-culture upon a world exhausted by wars hot and cold and corrupted by vacuous materialism.
Recent accounting scandals, crumbling markets, political scams, human rights violations, technological setbacks, and rising social tensions have revealed how rotten and inherently contradictory the US edifice is and how concerned are Americans with appearances rather than substance.
To religious fundamentalists, America is the Great Satan, a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah, a cesspool of immorality and spiritual decay. To many European liberals, the United states is a throwback to darker ages of religious zealotry, pernicious bigotry, virulent nationalism, and the capricious misrule of the mighty.
According to most recent surveys by Gallup, MORI, the Council for Secular Humanism, the US Census Bureau, and others - the vast majority of Americans are chauvinistic, moralizing, bible-thumping, cantankerous, and trigger-happy. About half of them believe that Satan exists - not as a metaphor, but as a real physical entity.
America has a record defense spending per head, a vertiginous rate of incarceration, among the highest numbers of legal executions and gun-related deaths. It is still engaged in atavistic debates about abortion, the role of religion, and whether to teach the theory of evolution.
According to a series of special feature articles in The Economist, America is generally well-liked in Europe, but less so than before. It is utterly detested by the Muslim street, even in “progressive” Arab countries, such as Egypt and Jordan. Everyone - Europeans and Arabs, Asians and Africans - think that “the spread of American ideas and customs is a bad thing.”
Admittedly, we typically devalue most that which we have formerly idealized and idolized.
To the liberal-minded, the United States of America reified the most noble, lofty, and worthy values, ideals, and causes. It was a dream in the throes of becoming, a vision of liberty, peace, justice, prosperity, and progress. Its system, though far from flawless, was considered superior - both morally and functionally - to anything ever conceived by Man.
Such unrealistic expectations inevitably and invariably lead to disenchantment, disillusionment, bitter disappointment, seething anger, and a sense of humiliation for having been thus deluded, or, rather, self-deceived. This backlash is further exacerbated by the haughty hectoring of the ubiquitous American missionaries of the “free-market-cum-democracy” church.
Americans everywhere aggressively preach the superior virtues of their homeland. Edward K. Thompson, managing editor of “Life” (1949-1961) warned against this propensity to feign omniscience and omnipotence: “Life (the magazine) must be curious, alert, erudite and moral, but it must achieve this without being holier-than-thou, a cynic, a know-it-all, or a Peeping Tom.”
Thus, America’s foreign policy - i.e., its presence and actions abroad - is, by far, its foremost vulnerability.
According to the Pew study, the image of the Unites States as a benign world power slipped dramatically in the space of two years in Slovakia (down 14 percent), in Poland (-7), in the Czech Republic (-6) and even in fervently pro-Western Bulgaria (-4 percent). It rose exponentially in Ukraine (up 10 percent) and, most astoundingly, in Russia (+24 percent) - but from a very low base.
The crux may be that the USA maintains one set of sanctimonious standards at home while egregiously and nonchalantly flouting them far and wide. Hence the fervid demonstrations against its military presence in places as disparate as South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia.
In January 2000, Staff Sergeant Frank J. Ronghi sexually molested, forcibly sodomized (”indecent acts with a child”) and then murdered an 11-years old girl in the basement of her drab building in Kosovo, when her father went to market to do some shopping. His is by no means the most atrocious link in a long chain of brutalities inflicted by American soldiers overseas, the latest of which are taking place in Iraq. In all these cases, the perpetrators were removed from the scene to face justice - or, more often, a travesty thereof - back home.
Americans - officials, scholars, peacemakers, non-government organizations - maintain a colonial state of mind. Backward natives come cheap, their lives dispensable, their systems of governance and economies inherently inferior. The white man’s burden must not be encumbered by the vagaries of primitive indigenous jurisprudence. Hence America’s fierce resistance to and indefatigable obstruction of the International Criminal Court.
Opportunistic multilateralism notwithstanding, the USA still owes the poorer nations of the world close to $200 million - its arrears to the UN peacekeeping operations, usually asked to mop up after an American invasion or bombing. It not only refuses to subject its soldiers to the jurisdiction of the World Criminal Court - but also its facilities to the inspectors of the Chemical Weapons Convention, its military to the sanctions of the (anti) land mines treaty and the provisions of the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty, and its industry to the environmental constraints of the Kyoto Protocol, the rulings of the World Trade Organization, and the rigors of global intellectual property rights.
Despite its instinctual unilateralism, the United States is never averse to exploiting multilateral institutions to its ends. It is the only shareholder with a veto power in the International Monetary Fund (IMF), by now widely considered to have degenerated into a long arm of the American administration. The United Nations Security Council, raucous protestations aside, has rubber-stamped American martial exploits from Panama to Iraq.
It seems as though America uses - and thus, perforce, abuses - the international system for its own, ever changing, ends. International law is invoked by it when convenient - ignored when importune.
In short, America is a bully. It is a law unto itself and it legislates on the fly, twisting arms and breaking bones when faced with opposition and ignoring the very edicts it promulgates at its convenience. Its soldiers and peacekeepers, its bankers and businessmen, its traders and diplomats are its long arms, an embodiment of this potent and malignant mixture of supremacy and contempt.
But why is America being singled out?
In politics and even more so in geopolitics, double standards and bullying are common. Apartheid South Africa, colonial France, mainland China, post-1967 Israel - and virtually every other polity - were at one time or another characterized by both. But while these countries usually mistreated only their own subjects - the USA does so also exterritorialy.
Even as it never ceases to hector, preach, chastise, and instruct - it does not recoil from violating its own decrees and ignoring its own teachings. It is, therefore, not the USA’s intrinsic nature, nor its self-perception, or social model that I find most reprehensible - but its actions, particularly its foreign policy.
America’s manifest hypocrisy, its moral talk and often immoral walk, its persistent application of double standards, irks and grates. I firmly believe that it is better to face a forthright villain than a masquerading saint. It is easy to confront a Hitler, a Stalin, or a Mao, vile and bloodied, irredeemably depraved, worthy only of annihilation. The subtleties of coping with the United States are far more demanding and far less rewarding.
This self-proclaimed champion of human rights has aided and abetted countless murderous dictatorships. This alleged sponsor of free trade is the most protectionist of rich nations. This ostensible beacon of charity contributes less than 0.1% of its GDP to foreign aid (compared to Scandinavia’s 0.6%, for instance). This upright proponent of international law (under whose aegis it bombed and invaded half a dozen countries this past decade alone) is in avowed opposition to crucial pillars of the international order.
Naturally, America’s enemies and critics are envious of its might and wealth. They would have probably acted the same as the United States, if they only could. But America’s haughtiness and obtuse refusal to engage in soul searching and house cleaning do little to ameliorate this antagonism.
To the peoples of the poor world, America is both a colonial power and a mercantilist exploiter. To further its geopolitical and economic goals from Central Asia to the Middle East, it persists in buttressing regimes with scant regard for human rights, in cahoots with venal and sometimes homicidal indigenous politicians. And it drains the developing world of its brains, its labour, and its raw materials, giving little in return.
All powers are self-interested - but America is narcissistic. It is bent on exploiting and, having exploited, on discarding. It is a global Dr. Frankenstein, spawning mutated monsters in its wake. Its “drain and dump” policies consistently boomerang to haunt it.
Both Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega - two acknowledged monsters - were aided and abetted by the CIA and the US military. America had to invade Panama to depose the latter and to molest Iraq for the second time in order to force the removal of the former.
The Kosovo Liberation Army, an American anti-Milosevic pet, provoked a civil war in Macedonia tin 2001. Osama bin-Laden, another CIA golem, restored to the USA, on September 11, 2001 some of the materiel it so generously bestowed on him in his anti-Russian days.
Normally the outcomes of expedience, the Ugly American’s alliances and allegiances shift kaleidoscopically. Pakistan and Libya were transmuted from foes to allies in the fortnight prior to the Afghan campaign. Milosevic has metamorphosed from staunch ally to rabid foe in days.
This capricious inconsistency casts in grave doubt America’s sincerity - and in sharp relief its unreliability and disloyalty, its short term thinking, truncated attention span, soundbite mentality, and dangerous, “black and white”, simplism.
In its heartland, America is isolationist. Its denizens erroneously believe that the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave is an economically self-sufficient and self-contained continent. Yet, it is not what Americans trust or wish that matters to others. It is what they do. And what they do is meddle, often unilaterally, always ignorantly, sometimes forcefully.
Elsewhere, inevitable unilateralism is mitigated by inclusive cosmopolitanism. It is exacerbated by provincialism - and American decision-makers are mostly provincials, popularly elected by provincials. As opposed to Rome, or Great Britain, America is ill-suited and ill-equipped to micromanage the world.
It is too puerile, too abrasive, too arrogant and it has a lot to learn. Its refusal to acknowledge its shortcomings, its confusion of brain with brawn (i.e., money or bombs), its legalistic-litigious character, its culture of instant gratification and one-dimensional over-simplification, its heartless lack of empathy, and bloated sense of entitlement are detrimental to world peace and stability.
America is often called by others to intervene. Many initiate conflicts or prolong them with the express purpose of dragging America into the quagmire. It then is either castigated for not having responded to such calls - or reprimanded for having responded. It seems that it cannot win. Abstention and involvement alike garner it only ill-will.
But people call upon America to get involved because they know it rises to the challenge. America should make it unequivocally and unambiguously clear that - with the exception of the Americas - its sole interests rest in commerce. It should make it equally known that it will protect its citizens and defend its assets, if need be by force.
Indeed, America’s - and the world’s - best bet are a reversion to the Monroe and (technologically updated) Mahan doctrines. Wilson’s Fourteen Points brought the USA nothing but two World Wars and a Cold War thereafter. It is time to disengage.
Note - America the Narcissist
The majority of worldwide respondents to the last two global Pew enter surveys (in 2002 and 2006) regarded the United States as the greatest menace to world peace - far greater than the likes of Iraq or China. Thinkers and scholars as diverse as Christopher Lasch in “The Cultural Narcissist” and Theodore Millon in “Personality Disorders of Everyday Life” have singled out the United States as the quintessential narcissistic society.
The “American Dream” in itself is benign. It involves materialistic self-realization, the belief in the ideal of equal opportunities and equal access to the system, and in just rewards for hard work, merit, and natural gifts. But the Dream has been rendered nightmarish by the confluence with America’s narcissistic traits.
America’s internal ethos is universally-accepted by all Americans. It incorporates the American Dream and the conviction that America stands for everything that is good and right. Consequently, as the reification of goodness, the United States is in constant battle with evil and its ever-changing demonic emissaries - from Hitler to Saddam Hussein.
There is no national consensus about America’s external ethos. Some Americans are isolationists, others interventionists. Both groups are hypervigilant, paranoid, and self-righteous - but isolationists are introverted and schizoid. Theirs is siege mentality. Interventionists are missionary. They feel omnipotent and invincible. They are extroverted and psychopathic.
This pathology can be traced back and attributed to a confluence of historical events and processes, the equivalents of trauma and abuse in an individual’s early childhood.
The United States of America started out as a series of loosely connected, remote, savage, and negligible colonial outposts. The denizens of these settlements were former victims of religious persecution, indentured servants, lapsed nobility, and other refugees. Their Declaration of Independence reads like a maudlin list of grievances coupled with desperate protestations of love and loyalty to their abuser, the King of Britain.
The inhabitants of the colonies defended against their perceived helplessness and very real inferiority with compensatory, imagined, and feigned superiority and fantasies of omnipotence. Victims frequently internalize their abusers and themselves become bullies. Hence the rough, immutable kernel of American narcissism.
The United States was (until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s) and still is, in some important respects, a
pre-Enlightenment, white supremacist society. It is rife with superstition, prejudice, conspicuous religiosity, intolerance, philistinism, and lack of social solidarity. Its religiosity is overt, aggressive, virulent and
ubiquitous. It is replete with an eschatology, which involves a changing cast of demonized “enemies”, both political and cultural.
The Civil War was fought between 2 America’s: the South, a perverted rendition of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the North, a harbinger of modern, multicultural immigrant societies. The North and the American Dream prevailed, the slaves were freed, and the Southern way of life, that of “gentlemen with leisure”, was replaced by a workaholic society where everyone is a slave to money and leisure is an ever rarer commodity.
Americans’ religion is a manifestation of their “Chosen People Syndrome”. They are missionary, messianic, zealous, fanatical, and nauseatingly self-righteous, bigoted, and hypocritical. This is especially discernible in the double-speak and double-standard that underlies American foreign policy.
Narcissism is frequently comorbid with paranoia. Americans cultivate and nurture a siege mentality which leads to violent acting out and unbridled jingoism. Their persecutory delusions sit well with their adherence to social Darwinism (natural selection of the fittest, let the weaker fall by the wayside, might is right, etc.).
Consequently, the United States always finds itself in company with the least palatable regimes in the world: together with Nazi Germany it had a working eugenics program (the 1935 anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws and the Nazi sterilization law were modeled after American anti-miscegenation and sterilization statutes), together with the likes of Saudi Arabia it executes its prisoners, it was the last developed nation to abolish slavery, alone with South Africa it had instituted official apartheid in a vast swathe of its territory.
Add to this volatile mix an ethos of malignant individualism, racism both latent and overt, a trampling, “no holds barred” ambitiousness, competitiveness, frontier violence-based morality, and proud simple-mindedness - and an ominous portrait of the United States as a deeply disturbed polity emerges.
It may sound like a bad joke, but the sad truth is that Africa’s short-lived experiment with democracy faces hard times.
From Nigeria to Zimbabwe, Kenya to the Ivory Coast and Uganda to Cameroon, the writing is on the wall. The experiment with democracy has sadly taken a dangerous nosedive.
Recent political events point to a crisis of honest, committed and democratic leadership. This ironically, is in spite of the advancements in education and intellectualism. It is also in spite of the influences of globalisation and the new understandings that have evolved about state power and how it should be managed for the benefit of society.
The continent’s so-called democratic leaders are openly subverting the people’s will and disregarding national constitutions as they continue in the bad ways of wild corruption and unaccountable leadership. The celebrations that heralded democratic change in the 1990s have gradually faded into muffled cries of despair. Increasingly, ordinary people find themselves removed from the centres of power, marginalised and reduced to helpless onlookers as political leaders; their friends and families enjoy power.
It is simply absurd to see Zimbabwe helplessly held to ransom by Mugabe’s adamant refusal to accept an electoral verdict handed him by the people through an open and fair election process. The 84-year-old is not about to give up the reins of power even as his country sinks deeper into economic ruin.
The recent elections in Zimbabwe revealed that African politicians demonstrate little or no sense of dignity and respect for political transition. And since they bring little or no dignity to public office, they are mortally fearful of transitions.
In Kenya, the results of a presidential poll last December were manipulated. The electoral commission remains in office despite calls for them to step down and allow for thorough investigation into the vote tallying process. Recent calls by civil society groups, for Kivuitu and his team to resign have fallen on deaf ears.
In Uganda, Museveni forced himself into a third term despite the country’s constitution providing for only two terms. His close associates have since continued to campaign for a life presidency for him.
Elsewhere in Cameroon, President Biya is seeking to extend his term. He has been in power for the last 25 years, within which period he suppressed any dissenting voices.
Early this year, the country’s security forces crushed protests against his bid to stay in power. Opposition voices have been hunted down and crushed or intimidated into silence as Biya and his cronies continue to savour the trappings of power.
In Nigeria, former celebrated president Obasanjo now faces charges of abuse of office during his term. A court was recently told that he slept with his eldest son’s wife in exchange for lucrative government contracts. These and many other cases clearly illustrate the depth to which Africa’s political leadership has sunk.
In all, the recent events in Kenya, Cameroon and Zimbabwe also illustrate another baffling side of African politics. That the more we talk about change the more things remain the same or probably get worse. The signing of the power sharing accord between Raila and Kibaki last February was seen by many as heralding a new beginning. However, recent developments point to reluctance, particularly on the part of the Party of National Unity, to share power as clearly spelt out in the national peace accord.
Into the first decade of the 21 Century, contrary to expectation, Africa is reluctant to make bold steps towards strengthening democracy. Instead it is taking calamitous steps back into the Dark Age of misrule, lack of accountability, despondency and totalitarianism. Its leaders have forgotten that they preside over whole countries and communities and not just a few cronies and friends intent on eating off the state.
The fear is that the new century may be lost for Africa, if its leadership will not quickly embrace new values that are in sync with the dictates of the modern world. The 21 Century global reality has no place for visionless leadership. Africans will need to raise their voices against complacent and non-democratic leadership if any change at all is to come.
On Saturday, when the Rules Committee of the Democratic National Committee meets to determine the fate of Florida and Michigan’s delegations to this summer’s convention, it will have some company. A group of Hillary Clinton supporters has announced it will demonstrate outside.
