"Outside Iraq they talk about democracy and blah, blah, blah. But you know the joke around here: ‘Be nice to the Americans or they will punish you with democracy.”
Democracy Kills
BBC World Affairs correspondent HUMPHREY HAWKSLEY considers how our notions of democracy inform and obscure foreign policy, and explores the impact of failed and violent states in fiction and reportage.
Usama Rehda is a brave young man.
He scrapes a living as a wedding photographer. To get to the relatively safe spot in Baghdad where we met, he traveled in three different taxis because his journey took him through neighbourhoods controlled by rival militia.
We sat on a bench by the Tigris River and he showed me family snapshots, pointing out those who had died, fled or been kidnapped.
"I lost two cousins. No sorry, three cousins. This cousin here, too" he said, pointing to an attractive student with a beam of a smile. "She was killed by a suicide bomber."
"If someone said you are not allowed to vote or criticize the government," I asked him, "but you could travel, go to school, make money and live a safe life - would you prefer that."
"Yes," he answered, his eyes lighting up as if this might soon be a new option. "As long as I have a good job and good services and have freedom to travel, why would I not give up my right to criticize the people in power. I am happy to give up this right.
"Would that be a better way?"
"Yes, of course. Outside Iraq they talk about democracy and blah, blah, blah. But you know the joke around here: 'Be nice to the Americans or they will punish you with democracy."
Far away, on another continent, in the remote town of Sanniquellie in Liberia, the afternoon sun glared through wooden slats into a meeting hall. The townsfolk were gathered for a lively meeting on how to re-build their communities after civil war.
"We went all around into the villages and down to the clans," the county superintendent, Mohan Kromah, told me during a break. "We asked them: 'What is it you need?' and they came out with three priorities - roads, education and health."
"And if it was a choice between a new road and an election," I asked.
He laughed. "Election is nice," he said. "But the road we need."
Very slowly, over the past few years, writers have begun to expose the flaws in the West's devotion to democracy as the best way to end violence and alleviate poverty in the developing world. The catalyst was the 2003 invasion of Iraq after which it quickly became clear that no plans had been drawn up to deal with the immediate weeks that followed.
Rory Stewart, with pinches of black humour and detailed observations, captured the day to day challenges facing a young administrator of the occupying powers in southern Iraq in his book Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing Iraq. A superb insight into America's neo-conservative policy came from Imperial Life in the Emerald City - Inside Baghdad's Green Zone by Washington Post correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekan. He tells how young idealists picked for their loyalty to the President George W Bush set up camp in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone to use Iraq as a testing ground for their democratic and free-market ideals.
We now know the results.
As conflict took hold in Iraq, so Afghanistan was allowed to drift. Other wars broke out in the Middle East. Africa continued to become more violent and poor. Meanwhile, to the east, China scorned the West's democratic mission and shored up its power as the factory of the world. Its wealth gradually spread among its people, with neighbouring countries riding on its success. When the global economic crisis struck last year, it was China and the United States working together who were seen as the big hitters that would pull the world out of recession.
Martin Jacques lays out the challenge in When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World , and Will Hutton explains the economic gamble China is taking in The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century.
These arguments directly challenge the West's frequent insistence that full sovereign elections be held in unstable countries in exchange for international aid. But they have yet to percolate among many Western leaders.
So far they have failed to formulate a policy for the biggest foreign policy problem of our time - fixing the failed state and corrupt regime so that it does not become a sanctuary for international terror. This, after all, is why British, American and other soldiers from Western democracies have been dying in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Had for example, Western leaders, particularly George W Bush and Tony Blair, swatted up properly on their homework, they might have been able to anticipate the many pitfalls that we have fallen into in recent years.
Take for example the insurgency in Iraq. In 1986, after the dictator Ferdinand Marcos was deposed in the Philippines, his successor, Corazon Aquino, faced more than seven coup attempts by a military that had yet to understand the compromises needed for democracy to work. Given that these were soldiers who still had their jobs, housing, pensions and salaries, it did not need great foresight to ask what Iraqi soldiers would do once they were all summarily sacked in May 2003.
They could easily have laid their hands on a copy of The Philippines in Crisis: Development and Security in the Aquino Era, 1986-91 by W. Scott Thompson, just as they could have taken note of the massive looting that took place after the 1989 American invasion in Panama that paralysed the country for weeks - of which many books have been written, including one by an American Independent Commission.
In April 2003, an American colonel escorted me around Baghdad's magnificent art deco railway station, chaotic with Iraqis trying to flee the city and railway staff rebelling because they hadn't been paid. When I asked why the US seemed so ill-prepared for what was happening, he replied: "The looting has disrupted everything. We had no idea it was going to happen."
If our elected leaders cannot even take note of repercussions only twenty years back in history, there is little wonder it they seem like deer caught in headlights when it comes to dealing with the worsening problems of Africa, the Middle East and the developing world.
Several authors have now been delving into this apparently insoluble problem and beginning to point to ways through. Niall Ferguson's many works have taken historical looks at colonialism and global economy to give it a place in modern events.
Paul Collier has pioneered studies in The Bottom Billion - Why the poorest countries are failing and what can be done about it and its sequel Wars Guns and Votes - Democracy in dangerous places. And Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart have looked in microscopic detail at ways to move out of the time-worn formula of elections and aid in Fixing Failed States - A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World.
My own book, Democracy Kills; What So Good About Having the Vote openly exposes the risks of holding elections in societies with weak institutions, pointing out that for democracy to work any society needs an uncorrupt police force, judiciary, civil service and other organisations to keep the checks and balances all governments needs.
If those mechanisms are not in place, there is a high risk of elections having the opposite effect to what's intended. Voting widens ethnic and religious rivalries, causing violence. Speculative money flows in undermining official authority and parliaments end up representing vested interests.
They might give the government international legitimacy, but they do very little to help the poor of deliver greater freedoms to the people.
Fiction, too, is exploring the impact of the failed and violent state on the people who live. The best I have read is the trilogy by the Algerian writer Mohammed Moulessehoul who had to give himself the female pseudonym of Yasmina Khadra in order to get published.
Time and again he highlights the importance of self-esteem and dignity and warns of the dangers of them being destroyed by oppression. "When self-esteem has been wounded all tragedies become possible," he wrote. "The instance you really learn to hate is when you become aware of your own impotence."
The debate on personal dignity and the new balance of power between societies is brilliantly laid out by Parag Khanna in Second World: How Emerging Powers are Redefining Global Competition in the Twenty-first Century, in which he writes about the growing influence of Brazil, China, Russia, Turkey and others who mix democracy and authoritarianism as they try to move their own country's forward.
In our travels, both Parag and I met Charles Tang chairman of the Brazil-China Chamber of Commerce. Tang is a man of the Second World in which democracy and the holding of elections, plays second fiddle to economic growth and stability.
The Chinese government has removed 400 million people from poverty," argues Tang. "These people now participate in economic growth and they live with dignity. That is a true victory for human rights. That's what human rights are all about."
This challenge thrown down to the West is encapsulated in a question I put in Democracy Kills. Dictatorial Cuba and democratic Haiti have much shared culture and history and lie barely hundred miles apart in the Caribbean. Haitians have had every opportunity Western democracy has to offer, yet they are far poorer, unhealthier and illiterate than Cubans. The average Cuban lives to 77 against a Haitian's 57.
If these were the only two countries where you and your loved ones could live, which one would you choose and why? After you have made your personal choice, imagine that your decision will also affect millions of others who have no hospitals, schools, roads, live in corrupt and violent societies, yet are trying to build a better life for themselves and their children.
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Humphrey Hawksley is a BBC World Affairs Correspondent. Democracy Kills: What's So Good About Having The Vote? is published by Macmillan.
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Monday, 7 September, 2009
In Features
- Cash, Comfort and the Genesis of Literary Monsters by Henry Sutton
- Review of the Year 2009
- Tales from the City
- Chicago!
- Democracy Kills
- Talking the Shifting Talk
- Philosophical Balm for Troubled Times
- Concealed Identites
- A Small Catalogue of the Uncurated
- Literary Islands
- Christmas on the Page
- Natural Pursuits
- A Few of My Favourite Things
- The End of the World as We Know It
- Troy Stories
- Inspiring a Great Scot
- Writing Abroad
- The Fog of War
Buy books
Democracy Kills: What's So Good About the Vote?
The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World
Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq
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