Category: Elections/democratization

(1) You could not hold it.
(2) You could hold it, but make the conditions for campaigning and voting very unfair. (Egypt 2006, Florida 2000.)
(3) You could hold it and then toss out or try to burn many boxes full of your opponents’ ballots. (Haiti, right now.)
(4) You could hold it, and then tie the post-election government-formation process up in knots for several months (US-occupied Iraq, Jan. 2005 and currently– see today’s DDI counter here, now at ’62 days’.)
(5) You could hold it, and then threaten the duly elected leadership with “economic starvation” (occupied Palestine, currently.)
(6) You could hold it, and then send your goons in to beat up and terrorize the entire electorate (East Timor, 1999.)
(7) On the other hand, you could hold the election, allow for fair and equal campaigning and an orderly and transparent voting process, and then undertake to work in good faith, good order, and decent respect with whatever leadership emerges. How revolutionary is that?
(God help the peoples of Haiti, Palestine, and Iraq.)

There’s a Filipina woman called Yvette Lopez who is one of my heroes. She has been working for around two years now for a Catholic-based international development organization— deployed in Somaliland.
Do you know where or what Somaliland is?
It’s a portion of what on international maps is called Somalia… a place that is today– tragically– an almost totally non-functioning country. But some years ago Somaliland and, I think, a couple of other portions of “Somalia” just decided to carry on doing their own thing, trying to rebuild their society from the ground up.
Yvette has been there as one of a small number of international development workers helping them do that. To do her job in Somaliland she left her husband and daughter behind at home in the Philippines.
And she writes a really beautiful blog. It’s in English, and she posts great pics that give you a real idea of what Somaliland is like.
(Hint: it’s a very, very poor, war-ravaged country. There are frequent security scares. But Yvette usually seems to be able to be very productive. She seems to have made some great friends there, too, and has become quite a connoisseur of the best camel-meat restaurants in the capital, Hargeisa.)
This past week, Yvette’s been one of the international election monitors in Somaliland’s parliamentary elections. You can read a great account of her activities doing that if you start at this Sept. 26 post on her blog, and then go forward a page at a time until October 1 (and probably beyond there, too.)
Mainly I read (and link to) Yvette’s blog because I admire what she does, so much. But I’m also very interested in the situation of Somaliland itself, which seems to be a little like that of Iraqi Kurdistan, or Kosovo, or perhaps now Gaza. In other words it’s a part of the inhabited world where the sovereignty situation is very fluid indeed, and where fairly strong locally based based communities are trying to develop their own “nation state”-type institutions.
I guess you could put Somaliland’s nascent parliament into the category of such institutions.
Regarding Somalia, meanwhile– the country from which Somaliland has been breaking off– the famous war photographer Kevin Sites has started his “Hotzone” direct newsfeed for Yahoo.com from there this week. Mainly he’s been showcasing the misery and violence in the capital, Mogadishu. (Like here.) Actually, he hasn’t just been doing photography. He’s also been making videos and writing almost-daily blog entires. Boy, they keeping him busy!
Next week, Kevin’s going to be in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I must really try to see all the work he does there. Some four million people have died due the conflicts in DRC in the past five or so year– but the US MSM seldom even mentions the place…
Meanwhile, I want most of this post to be about Yvette and her steady, building-from-the-ground-up work in Somaliland. You’re doing such a great job there, Yvette.

Interesting to be here in Europe at a time of such political uncertainty in Germany. Also, when are the results of the Afghanistan elections due?

James Rupert, the Islamabad correspondent of New York Newsday, has recently been making the interesting argument that westerners who want to see the spread of democracy in the Muslim-peopled parts of the world should entertain the idea that, as he puts it, “in some cases only ‘Islamic government’ can be the solution.”
I am therefore pleased to publish here, as an exclusive publication of ‘Just World News’*, a short text in which he makes this case…. (drum-roll)

Islams and democracy
by James Rupert
Islamabad, mid-August 2005

As Muslim peoples debate secular and “Islamic” forms of government, we in the West are given to shuddering at the idea of “Islamic republics” or a role in government for sharia law. And of course, there are plenty of human rights abuses under “Islamic” systems to make us shudder! But I think Westerners who yearn to see real democracy in the Muslim world must hear the idea (promoted recently by Brown University Prof. William Beeman and others) that Islamic government can be part of the solution instead of being seen as the problem.
Indeed, I’d suggest that in some cases only “Islamic government” can be the solution. I was reminded of the argument for this last week in the Dir Valley of Pakistan’s Pashtun belt, near the Afghan border. In Dir, Shad Begum, an energetic social worker in her 20s, is pushing the kind of revolution that I think most of us would want to see: education and basic health services for girls and women, and a voice in government for the female half of society.
Shad faces the Pashtuns’ iron culture of absolute male power and frequent enslavement of women (a repression dressed and legitimized to a largely illiterate population as “Islam”). In her insular, tradition-bound society, she has no conceivable tool but Islam with which to challenge this misrule. In her case, of course, it’s an Islam grounded in a much broader reading of the literature of her faith than that of those in power.
For those of us who are Western outsiders amid this battle of Islams, I think it’s very hard to understand how deeply any contribution we might want to make has been tainted by the baggage of still-not-so-long-ago Western colonization, Israel-Palestine, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, etc. In Dir, the most dangerous thing our friend Shad does is to quietly take grants from Western relief and development agencies.
In Friday sermons, Dir’s mullahs condemn the “obscenity and vulgarity” threatened by outsiders bent on change. And the men listen. Up the valley last month, a male relative shot social worker Zubaida Begum and her daughter to death after another worshipper taunted him (police reported) about failing to control her “un-Islamic” activities.
There’s a reason that the tribal khans and landlords of Dir dress their repression as religion, and it’s the reason that any reform must be dressed the same way. Put a little crudely, it’s the only thing that sells. Westerners might fondly yearn for Shad to campaign for a more comfortably familiar, secular order in this corner of the Muslim world. But in Dir, it’s hard to imagine her making any progress (or indeed surviving) by standing on a soapbox to recite Tom Paine.
Obviously, not all of the Islamic world is the Pashtun extreme, and the depth and details of the Islamic dress in which governments must come will vary. And just as obviously, we need to pay urgent attention when the “Islamic” features of Muslim-world governments are cover for repression. It’s something that Iraqis fear as they draft their constitution these days, and God knows it’s an issue here in Pakistan, too.
But Western people and polities that shudder at the phrase “Islamic government” must learn to lose that reflex. Most of us in the West surely wish to help Muslim liberals and democrats, whether Iran’s celebrated Nobel laureate, Shirin Ebadi, or the unknown Shad Begum of Dir. But we must understand that Islamic forms of democracy are the only kind these liberals can build. If we can’t swallow that, the best thing we can do for Ebadi or Shad is to shut up and go home.
* Rupert had articulated much of this same argument in a private communication earlier. But he and I lightly edited that text to arrive at the present one, and he happily gave permission for publishing it on JWN.

Here’s the column I have in the CSM today.
The lede is:

Should Americans and their leaders be pushing for greater democratization in the Middle East even if this process risks bringing to power parties – including avowedly Islamist parties – that seem strongly opposed to US policies?
Yes. All people who claim they’re committed to democracy have to be for the process even if – at home or abroad – it brings to power parties with which we disagree. That is the whole point of democratic practice, after all: to allow people with widely differing ideas to work together to resolve those differences through discussion and the ballot box, rather than through violence.
But what if some countries elect committed Islamists as leaders?…

Anyway, you should read the whole thing to see what more I have to say about that.

Faiza of “A family in Baghdad” has her most recent post now up on her blog in English. Go read it. It’s about her experience at some kind of “democracy in Iraq” conference to which she’d been invited. It was hosted by some US organizations, which she doesn’t name but they probably included the US taxpayer-funded “U.S. National Endowment for Democracy” etc etc.
The conference was in Amman. Many women traveled to it from Iraq, though Faiza has been living in Amman for a few weeks now.
She and apparently many of the other Iraqi women at the conference were not happy with the “brain wash” they felt they were being exposed to there. I’d give you excerpts but regret I don’t have the time.

Things are really starting to heat up in the election campaign in Iraq, while in Palestine and Israel there’s a lot of complex “pre-negotiation” politics going on on both sides of the national divide.
In Iraq, at one level, there is of course the continuing campaign against the election, being waged violently by (mainly) Sunni Islamists (Salafists) and some former Baathists, but with a fairly high degree of popular support from a Sunni population stunned and upset by the violence that the US and the Allawists launched against Fallujah and a number of their other cities.
But in addition, there is evidently a mounting campaign within the group of leaders and political forces who are contesting the election: and primarily between Allawi and the Sistani-supported United Iraqi Alliance.
Allawi seemed to wake up pretty late to the fact that he needed to contest this election politically and not just thru the application of massive violence, which is what he tried to do (Baathist-style) thru the end of 2004.
Now, suddenly he’s offering all kinds of goodies to the Iraqi people, including scholarships for their children to go abroad and study just about anything they want!
He also tried to tell the UIA people that they couldn’t use Sistani’s image on their election propaganda. But to no avail.
Then yesterday, Allawi’s people announced that on election day no vehicles “except government vehicles” will be allowed to travel on Iraq’s roads. Since there have also been many allegations that his people inside the transitional government that he heads have been abusing their positions in order to boost his election campaign, the travel ban strikes me as a very dangerous and unfair proposal, though it was announced on so-called “security” grounds.
So how are the UIA people and other contenders in the election supposed to conduct their election-day activities if they’re not allowed to drive?
Where is the outrage over this issue in the US media?
Whoever can credibly claim “victory” in the Jan 30 election gets to do two things:

Continue reading “Politics in Iraq and Palestine/Israel”

Here is the column I have in today’s Christian Science Monitor.
It’s titled (not by me) “Democracy– after the vote” and tries to make the point that a commitment to “democracy” involves a lot more than simply sponsoring the holding of a single, (perhaps) technically fair, nationwide election. What I argue there is,

It is uncertain whether Iraq’s vote can be held as scheduled, given the breadth of the insurgency. But even if it is held, neither that election nor the one in Palestine will assure the rights of the voters unless Iraqis and Palestinians also rapidly win their national independence. In addition, during the process of transferring sovereignty, the US (and Israel) need to convey – and also model – two of the key “big ideas” behind any true theory of democracy: the need to resolve differences through discussion, rather than violence; and a complete respect for the rights of others, including – crucially – those with whom we disagree.
If the Palestinians and Iraqis do not speedily win national independence, then elections held to “interim” bodies will have little meaning. But worse, democracy itself can get a bad name…

Continue reading “CSM column on democratization”

The Quakers have had two schools in Ramallah since the 1870s or so. There used to be one for the boys and one for the girls. But now one is used as an upper school and one as a lower school. Countless thousands of Palestinians– Muslims, Christians (but very few Quakers)– are graduates of the Ramallah Friends School. There is a small meeting (congregation) of Palestinian Quakers that grew up over the decades, around the school.
Anyway, I was cruising around the BBC site just now and found a lovely little photo essay from election day yesterday. It was all shot in RFS!
If you just want to see what a ballot paper looked like, go to image # 3 there.

Commenter “b” posted the following thought-provoking comment onto Tuesday’s
post
here about the situation of holding elections “under the gun” of an occupying
army:

One point about Palestinian elections this coming Sunday. Many Palestinians
have been actually calling for such elections for a long time, knowing full
well they would be held under occupation. But having no elections had allowed
a corrupted political system to become entrenched. Those who favor elections
now — municipal, presidential and legislative — see this as a chance to
at least begin to put in place institutions that are responsive to those who
live under the occupation. It’s not a perfect setting for elections, but
compared to Iraq there will be a very large international presence, the actual
vote will probably be conducted by quite high standards of honesty, and there
are at least two plausible candidates who represent different positions on
key issues. So, for me, the clincher is that many Palestinians seem to want
the elections even in these circumstance, and the alternative right now is
not free elections free of occuaption, but no elections at all.

I agree with “b” on all his (or her) points, including: his (or her) empirical observation
that many– indeed, I would even say “nearly all”– Palestinians have been
calling for such elections for a long time, and for the reasons that “b” gives; the
judgment that though the setting of the vote is far from perfect, its actual
technical modalities will be pretty good; and the judgment that the important
thing is that this election is what “many”– or even “nearly all”– Palestinians seem
to want.

So that led me to ask the same kinds of questions about the Iraqi elections
later this month. In particular:

1. How actually democratic are the technical modalities for
these elections? and

2. How strong is the proportion of Iraqis that seem to want them to proceed
even if the setting is very far from perfect and the modalities also imperfect?

As I’ve noted in other posts on JWN on both the elections in Afghanistan
in October and the upcoming ones in Iraq (notably
here
), what needs to be developed is a category of elections that are judged
by members of the relevant national constituency to be “fair enough”,
rather than technically absolutely perfect elections.

The “fair enough” criterion is really important in a situation of recent
or ongoing conflict, since it forecloses the possibility of ex-post-facto
challenges to the outcome. Such challenges can be absorbed and
handled in, for example, the US in 2000, or Ukraine more recently, because
these countries have relatively stable national communities that are not
on the point of bursting (back) into deadly civil conflict. Where you
have countries that lack that kind of stability, contestation over the legitimacy
of an upcoming or recent election can exacerbate the existing tensions and
plunge a country back into civil war.

Continue reading “Voting under the gun, revisited”