The New Algeria?

 I'm a fervent believer in both democracy and in keeping church and state strictly separate. In Egypt these two values were in conflict - if not war - when Morsi won the popular vote to become the country's first democratically elected President. It was soon clear that the Muslim Brotherhood leader was not going to hesitate to bring a more religious bent to the new constitution and to Egyptian public life. So a part of me cannot but be happy that Morsi is gone. Deposed by his own purblindness and an even larger popular revolt than Mubarak faced two years ago. My hope was that if religious parties again won a large vote share in the next Presidential and parliamentary elections, they would be more focused on economic development versus driving a religious agenda - taking a cue from Turkey's ruling party, the AKP.  The AKP is also mildly Islamist but took a softly-softly approach in the first ten years of being in power - since they faced an entrenched, arguably anti-democratic secular establishment (army, judiciary, elite). The AKP government had to deliver astounding growth ((Turkey's GDP per capita has tripled in nominal terms in the last ten years) before it was strong enough to enact religion-influenced laws without the danger of being over-thrown.

However, if today's New York Times article is right, and the Muslim Brotherhood is going to be banned once again - then it will put paid to the hopes of establishing a real democracy in the country. And the fact that the power cuts and gas shortages disappeared almost as soon as Morsi fell, leads me to believe that the army/secular establishment was hard at work behind the scenes to artificially create conditions that would bring a cross-section of people out into the streets. The people of Egypt have been had, I think.

A democracy that excludes the main Islamist party from public life will by definition be truncated. The coup has established a year as the time within which a government must deliver tangible improvements to be judged worthy of staying in office. And when the new government fails to deliver significant improvements - (as is likely - who can turn around a country battered by 60 years of despotism amidst a slow-growing world economy in 365 days?) - it will also lose legitimacy.

Real democracy requires allowing the Muslim Brotherhood an unfettered right to win elections (if they can), form a government and fail to deliver on the mundane things - over 4-5 years - that ultimately all governments are judged on, by voters the second time around. That would be the best way to demystify and defang the Islamist parties. Otherwise, what the Egyptians liberals will be left with, is another frozen peace - where they have social freedoms but no real political freedoms. Or if they're unlucky, they'll face an internecine conflict with the disenfranchised Islamists, a la Algeria.

No Egyptian should want that.

Requiem For A Short-Lived Dream

Obscure Topic Alert

She was brave beyond belief. So ran the first sentence of Anna Politkovskaya’s obituary in the Economist. Regular readers of the magazine that likes to call itself a newspaper will know that the magazine is not given to exaggeration and hyperbole – if medieval England’s butlers had been locked up in a room and ordered to bring out a magazine every week, their writing style would probably be very much like that of the Economist.

It takes a lot to win the Economist’s unqualified admiration, the magazine specializes in seeing three or four sides of every issue where a regular person would barely manage to see two. And so, the strong language of the murdered Russian journalist’s obituary served to convey the sense of profound loss and anguish that the magazine felt. It also succeeded in giving me goose-bumps and bringing a few hot angry tears to my eyes – that this happened to such a person and that it will go unpunished.

I’ve been wanting to write about this for some time – just never got around to it…but it keeps coming back to haunt me. Anna Politkovskaya’s death is old news – so if you don’t remember it or never heard of it, its not really surprising. We can thank the localization – a really good euphemism for moronization – of all news for that. Anna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist who was murdered a couple of months back; she was 48, not that much younger than my Mom, a well-known journalist who’d become famous for reporting from the frontlines of the wars in Chechnya. She was respected for reporting the truth…often truth that shone a terrible light on Vladimir Putin’s government. On the night she was shot point blank, at close range, in the elevator block of her apartment, she was working on another Chechnya story that exposed alleged rights violations by the Russian army.

Her death, in my mind, was also the clearest signal yet, that the dream of democracy in Russia is largely dead. It came after several other dissident journalists and editors had been murdered and was followed by the radiation poisoning of another dissident in London and the killing of another journalist just last month.

The government that the immensely popular Putin is running seems to be the offspring of an illicit affair between plutocrats and the mafia. Putin with his quiet purge, is more frightening to me than Zimbabwe’s brutal and clownish Mugabe. It takes a special kind of dictator to order hits on specific, identified individuals versus masses of faceless protestors …you’d have to be cold-blooded enough to be sure that their faces wouldn’t come back, like Banquo’s ghost, to haunt you in your sleep. The fact that Putin seems unperturbed, as ever, is scary. (Of course, none of this is to say that Mugabe isn't the tyrant he is or that he hasn't ordered hits on dissidents)

There are those who will point to Putin’s popularity to justify Russia’s direction and other cynics who will trot out a dictator’s favourite adage – “Democracy is not for everyone – specially not for ________ " (fill in country’s name – Iraq, Afghanistan, Burma, China, Russia etc). The popularity argument is very weak – Hitler’s government was damn popular too in Germany at one point and he led the country into Poland. Or closer home – take Laloo Prasad Yadav who single-handedly ruined Bihar, or even a certain American president who recently won a popular 're'-election (Do I really need to say what happened after that?). Nope - popularity doesn't convince me that Putin deserves being cut some slack.

The second argument might have carried more weight – after all each country is different and the same system (i.e., democracy) need not be suitable to all. But the reason it falls apart is because the people who claim that democracy is not for their country are almost always the ones who stand to directly gain power and money in a dictatorship. Let the whole population – the poor, the dispossessed, the wretched and the depressed – march in the streets demanding a dictatorship and then I might think there’s something to it. Curiously enough, I can’t think of one instance of that having happened. Can you?

But these are theoretical debates. What’s tangible is, is Anna’s absence from the newspaper pages for those readers who drew courage from her (unfortunately I wasn’t one of them) and what's tangible is Russia’s absence from the ranks of democratic countries.

Anna – Rest in Peace – there are those who didn’t know you, who mourn you, even if many of your own countrymen don’t.