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| Secular Democracy: On the Retreat |
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Events since 9-11 are not the first time that western values have failed the credibility test when faced with stringent pressure. In 1861, Abraham Lincoln, considered by many as the greatest President of the United States, suspended civil law in certain territories and arrogated to the presidency all powers not delegated to him in the constitution. In 1862 he suspended habeas corpus and under military law imprisoned 13,000 members of the 'Copperhead Democrats', a group that opposed the war and who sought a new constitutional convention to frame an amendment to protect states' rights. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court declared Lincoln's actions unconstitutional. Instead of observing the rule of law, the cornerstone of western tradition, Lincoln issued an arrest warrant for the 84-year-old Chief Justice. Similarly during the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt, interned 120,000 Americans of Japanese origin in inland concentration camps through the signing of Executive Order 9066; their only crime was their racial origin. Guantanamo Bay, Belmarsh, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, the Patriot Act, anti-terrorism legislation of all guises, stop and search, internment, torture, sexual humiliation, executive ordered arrests, detention without trial, rendition of suspects to despotic regimes, brutal interrogations and illegal and imperialistic wars are not the only evidences of a civilisation that is in retreat, though these are indeed powerful signs. The more illuminating evidence is the mass indifference (and even complicit support) of the western public and their representatives while these things happen. Thus far there have been no mass street demonstrations over the roll-back of legal rights and values since 9-11. In fact, opinion polls indicate strong support for the tough anti-terror legislation and interrogation techniques in both the US and the UK. Nor have the public's elected representatives proved any wiser; in the UK MP's have turned Britain's House of Parliament which used to be known as the Mother of all Parliaments into a supine rubber stamp railroading into law anti-terror legislation after anti-terror legislation at the behest of a shameless executive. In the US the Patriot Act was also passed in record time after 9-11; the fact that hardly any legislator had read it was beside the point. Thus on both sides of the Atlantic, legislation which has effectively suspended habeas corpus and eight hundred years of political tradition has been passed in record time, yet laws relating to the prohibition of hunting a fox took years to come to the statute book. Max Hastings castigates the recent signing into law of the 2005 Anti-terrorism legislation:
"If Tony Blair was capable of such self-analysis, he might blush in shame and humiliation, that to many of us it would have been preferable to risk the malevolence of al-Qaida than to entrust his ministers with further latitude for abuse of our liberties. The royal assent to this shoddy measure is not a victory for Blair, but a defeat for all the rest of us."
Some may argue on the basis of this that democracy is certainly on the march - but into political decline.
Issue 2: Elections in the Muslim world have neither been free or fair - how can they be under occupation or imposed interim secular constitutions.
Elections have indeed been held recently in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine and millions of people have come out to vote after decades of being denied the opportunity. However it is not just elections that bind these three nations together; another common factor is that all these countries were under foreign occupation at the time of their elections. This in itself invalidates any concept of these elections being an exercise in measuring whether a government or a leader has legitimacy separate from that which is conferred by the occupying authority. To use an analogy that most students of American history may appreciate, it would have been like the founding fathers organising an election while British forces still occupied Philadelphia in 1776 under a constitution previously agreed in Westminster. In imposing interim constitutional arrangements, such as the Transitional Administrative Law in Iraq, provisions were made to exclude non-secular parties from the outset, i.e. the rules of the game were preset to ensure a favourable outcome. In so doing it is not surprising that pro-western secular leaders have been elected in Kabul, Gaza and Baghdad.
The last point in this regard is that recent political changes in the region are not simply the product of the invasion of Iraq. The events in Palestine were driven by the death of Arafat, not the capture of Saddam. The demonstrations by a minority in Beirut were more a reflection of their anger after the death of a former Prime Minister than a response to seeing people on their satellite televisions queuing to vote in Basra. The election of a President in Afghanistan was the product of an external military invasion, not a domestic uprising seeking political change. As Samuel Huntington recently said "The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do." When you are the dominant military power in a country as the Americans are in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is not that difficult to get your man into power or your favoured constitution to be passed; just remember Vidkun Quisling. Indeed President Bush who presumably failed to see the irony in his comments also concurs that free and fair elections cannot happen under occupation. Bush has repeatedly called for the immediate withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon prior to parliamentary elections in May 2005. If the presence of 14,000 Syrian troops nullifies an election in Lebanon, presumably ten times that number of US troops in Iraq makes the election there void as well.
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