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Friday, Mar 11, 2005

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Democracy in West Asia

By Seumas Milne

Managed elections are the latest device to prop up pro-Western regimes.

FOR WEEKS a Western chorus has been celebrating a new dawn of Middle Eastern freedom, allegedly triggered by the Iraq war. Tony Blair hailed a "ripple of change," encouraged by the United States and Britain, that was bringing democracy to benighted Muslim lands.

First the Palestinians, then the Iraqis have finally had a chance to choose their leaders, it is said, courtesy Western intervention, while dictatorships such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia are democratising under American pressure. And then in Lebanon, as if on cue, last month's assassination of the former Prime Minister triggered a wave of street protests against Syria's military presence that brought down the pro-Damascus Government in short order.

At last there was a democratic "cedar revolution" to match the U.S.-backed Ukrainian "orange revolution" and a display of people power to bolster George W. Bush's insistence that the region is with him.

The first decisive rebuff to this fairy tale of spin was delivered in Beirut on Tuesday, when at least 500,000 — some reports said it was more like a million — demonstrators took to the streets to show solidarity with embattled Syria and reject U.S. and European interference in Lebanon. Mobilised by Hizbullah, the Shia Islamist movement, their numbers dwarfed the nearby anti-Syrian protesters by perhaps 10 to one; and while the well-heeled Beiruti jeunesse doree have dominated the "people power" jamboree, most of Tuesday's demonstrators came from the Shia slums and the impoverished south. Mr. Bush's response was to ignore them completely. Whatever their numbers, they were, it seems, the wrong kind of people.

The anti-Syrian protests, dominated by the Christian and Druze minorities, are not in fact calling for a genuine democracy at all, but for elections under the long-established corrupt confessional carve-up, which gives the traditionally privileged Christians half the seats in Parliament and means no Muslim can ever be President.The neutralisation of Hizbullah, whose success in driving Israel out of Lebanon in 2000 won it enormous prestige in the Arab world, is certainly one aim of the U.S. campaign to push Syria out of Lebanon. But the pressure on Syria has plenty of other motivations: its withdrawal stands to weaken one of the last independent Arab regimes, however sclerotic, open the way for a return of Western and Israeli influence in Lebanon, and reduce Iran's leverage.

What the U.S. campaign is clearly not about is the promotion of democracy in either Lebanon or Syria, where the most plausible alternative to the Assad regime are radical Islamists. In a pronouncement which defies satire, Mr. Bush insisted on Tuesday that Syria must withdraw from Lebanon before elections due in May "for those elections to be free and fair." Why the same point does not apply to elections held in occupied Iraq — where the U.S. has 140,000 troops patrolling the streets, compared with 14,000 Syrian soldiers in the Lebanon mountains — or in occupied Palestine, for that matter, is unexplained. And why a United Nations resolution calling for Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon has to be complied with immediately, while those demanding an Israeli pullout from Palestinian and Syrian territory can be safely ignored for 38 years, is apparently unworthy of comment.

The claim that democracy is on the march in the Middle East is a fraud. It is not democracy but the U.S. military that is on the march. The Iraqi elections may have looked good on TV and allowed Kurdish and Shia parties to improve their bargaining power, but millions of Iraqis were unable or unwilling to vote, key political forces were excluded, candidates' names were secret, alleged fraud was widespread, the entire system designed to maintain U.S. control and Iraqis unable to vote to end the occupation. What has actually taken place since 9/11 and the Iraq war is a relentless expansion of U.S. control of West Asia. The Americans now have a military presence in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Qatar — and in not one of those countries did an elected government invite them in.

Of course Arabs want an end to tyrannical regimes, most of which have been supported over the years by the U.S., Britain and France: that is the source of much anti-Western Muslim anger. The dictators remain in place by U.S. licence, which can be revoked at any time — and managed elections are being used as another mechanism for maintaining pro-Western regimes rather than spreading democracy. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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