Unless you are a Brazilian football fan, there will be few good things to remember about 2002. The new year dawns with speculations of war, world stock markets down for the third year in succession, Palestine prostrate beneath one of Israel’s most hawkish Zionist governments and key OPEC member Venezuela tearing itself apart with a general strike.
George W. Bush set the tone for the year with his Jan. 1 State of the Union address, in which he said that Iraq, Iran and North Korea were part of “an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world”. These were, said the president, terrorist states and his war on terror was only just beginning. He spoke truer than he knew.
The US forces in Afghanistan, sent to clean up after the overthrow of the Taleban and their Al-Qaeda allies, are still cleaning up 12 months later and seem likely to be at the task in the mountainous region bordering Pakistan for a considerable time to come. Will Bush demonstrate in 2003 that he has learned how much easier it is to initiate a conflict than to finish it?
Throughout the year, Bush’s focus on Saddam and Iraq bordered upon the obsessive and seemed to justify the suspicion that he was out to finish his daddy’s unfinished Gulf War business. Yet, for all the talk of a February attack on Saddam, the new year begins with a far more potent and credible threat, on the other side of the world, from North Korea as it re-initiates its nuclear weapons program and places its fanatical armed forces on a high state of alert.
The old year was one of massive humiliation for the financial and business community, the very people who, five years ago, were telling us that they had finally invented the perpetual motion machine of prosperity. Energy trader Enron and telecoms group WorldCom crashed in two of the world’s biggest corporate bankruptcies, when it was discovered that they had lied and cheated about their financial results. Their internationally respected auditor Arthur Andersen was found to have helped them in their chicanery. Andersen collapsed and with it all other integrated consultancy and auditing practices which, we were once told, represented the epitome of efficiency and supervisory rectitude.
Some insiders may not have been surprised that beneath the glossy surface of business and auditing lay the corrosive rust of corruption. By contrast, many, including its architects, must have been extremely surprised that the European Union’s new single currency was launched on the first day of the year with hardly a hitch. As the year wore on, the euro recovered parity with the dollar. However, with the strict ground rules underpinning the currency already in danger of dilution, the euro may still need to prove itself in this new year.
Proof, in horrific abundance, is what 2003 saw presented at the Hague in the long-awaited trial of Serb dictator Slobodan Milosevic. The war crimes and genocide cases will continue for months yet and Milosevic, allegedly ill, may not live to take his punishment. But his prosecution is crucially important. Here was a man who used his overwhelming power to try and crush infinitely weaker enemies. He cared nothing for world opinion, rejected the advice of his closest allies, the Russians and unleashed three separate conflicts, all of which in the end turned out disastrously for his own country. Might is never invariably right — something that a lot of “mighty” men should remember.
Liberty’s expansion in a turbulent world
By Jonathan Power
Special to Arab News
LONDON — It always feels nice to open a New Year with good news. But that indeed is the message on the democracy front this week. It began in Kenya with the defeat last Sunday of the handpicked candidate of the longtime corrupt autocrat of Kenya, Daniel arap Moi. On Friday, Jan. 3, the election winner, Mwai Kibaki takes over as president and there is some hope that this clever ex-finance minister will be skilled enough to start to put the country back on its feet and to release the wealth of talent and energy that it has in abundance.
Despite the gloomy headlines that speak of war and dictatorship, Africa is in fact becoming more democratic. A decade-and-a-half ago few African countries held open elections. Now most do.
On Jan. 1, the working class hero, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, will be sworn in as president of Brazil. In an interview I made with him 25 years ago when he was a young leader, he spoke of his vision of a new Brazil where terrible disparities in wealth would be reduced enough for the poor to be at least able to eat three times a day.
Against most of the predictions of the last decades, he has finally won the presidency, supported by a majority that encompasses rich, poor and the middle. His mandate, in part, is to implement this long-held vision, while enabling the vast Brazilian economy to grow at a steady pace.
Also on Wednesday, Greece, not that long ago a brutal military dictatorship, takes over as president of the European Union and on Sunday, Jan. 5, Lithuania, until quite recently a submissive corner of the Soviet Union but now proudly independent, will vote on whether its president deserves a second term. Also on this day, Milan Milutinovic leaves office as president of Serbia and is likely voluntarily to surrender himself to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague where he has been charged with brutal offences committed in Kosovo.
All this is to remind us that despite the rattling of sabers over Iraq, growing fears of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, the absence of true democratic rights for the Palestinians and the ever- present threat of terrorists who abjure democracy, the world, in the round, is moving forward.
A new report from the authoritative Freedom House speaks of “significant worldwide progress in 2002” in expanding freedom and democracy. “Real gains outnumbered setbacks by a nearly three-to-one-margin”.
Notable improvements were made in parts of the world where terrorism poses a direct threat, including in majority Muslim and Arab countries. Muslim Senegal entered the top category in Freedom House’s league table — Free, meaning it has a full and open democracy and free expression. Bahrain moved from Not Free to Partly Free and there was significant pro-democracy ferment in Iran, Kuwait and Qatar. Muslim Afghanistan, Albania, Comoros, Tajikistan and, perhaps most important, already democratic Turkey took significant strides toward allowing more political and personal freedoms.
Contrary to much loose thinking, there is no unchangeable correlation between democracy and religious persuasion. Of course, it is a historical fact that democratic expansion first took place in the Protestant world. But as recently as the 1970s, commentators were arguing that there could never be an equal explosion in the Catholic world. But it happened in the 1980s, as it did in the authoritarian-inclined Orthodox world in the 1990s. Hindu India has long been democratic; and the concept of “Asian Values”, whereby it was argued that tradition-bound societies, influenced by Confucianism and Buddhism, could never accept democracy, has shown to be so much nonsense by the remarkable steps taken by Taiwan, South Korea and Thailand.
It is true that the Islamic world remains a democracy backwater but it is difficult to argue that there is some kind of inexorable link between tyranny and Islam. The Islamic world has been dominated by two extreme ideologies — secular Ba’athism (best known in Iraq) and revolutionary or jihadist Islamism. Both were shaped in the 1930s at a time when totalitarian movements dominated the European landscape.
Tragically, as a high official in the Bush administration, Richard Haass, recently admitted in an unusual speech, the US has made a grave historic mistake in supporting many of tyrannical regimes for its own short-term needs. If that could change, much else could change in the Islamic world.
According to the Freedom House survey, 89 countries are now Free, up from 43 in 1972. Fifty-six countries are judged to be Partly Free, up from 38 in 1972. Of the 2.2 billion people in the world who live in the Not Free countries, 60 percent live in China.
The message for the world’s enlightened democracies is that they must make sure that China never decides to set about undermining free Taiwan and that the freedoms inherited by Hong Kong are not wheedled away.
These two outposts of freedom must be encouraged and preserved if mainland China is ever to be persuaded that openness and democracy would be better ways of governing the mainland’s complex society.
Change China and the world will take a great leap forward. That, and real democracy and independence in Palestine are the two departures the world of 2003 badly needs.
