I’VE read somewhere that Gen Pervez Musharraf likens the Pakistan of his dreams to a stable secular Turkey, but to the naked eye from across the border his country represents an admixture of Myanmar and Algeria.
A military junta cancelled Myanmar’s elections in 1990. Another set of generals cancelled Algeria’s parliamentary elections the following year.
The West cheered the subversion of democracy in Algeria. But in Myanmar, the trampling of the people’s will evidently failed to get the required approval of those that matter.
In today’s Pakistan, the mullahs and the liberal middle ground are jostling for political space they want the military to vacate, but who would win a free and fair election remains a matter of conjecture. Many a proud Pakistani would of course insist that the mullahs have no electoral strength except what they have managed to corner with the military’s ill-advised help. This could be an exaggeration.
For the record, Algeria’s 1991 national assembly elections were cancelled by a military coup after the first round itself, triggering a bloody civil war. The military expressed concerns that the FIS (Islamic Salvation Front), which was almost certain to win more than the two-thirds majority of seats required to change the Algerian constitution, would end democracy and impose an Islamic state.
The irony is very telling: 1991 was the year when Muslim extremists were being admired for their good work in Afghanistan and thereby in Pakistan. It was a strange equation. Afghan extremists were the spearhead of good intentions. Was there a western conspiracy against Muslim radicals winning elections? If that were true how should we account for the CIA-backed coups against Mohammed Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953, who was not a Muslim extremist, and Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, just to give two examples? There are of course many more.
We noted that though the West was pleased with the Algerian military coup, it was apparently miffed by a similar subversion in Myanmar. The double standards were obvious from the fact that despite the military’s repression of Aung San Suu Kyi’s victorious party, Dick Cheney, as the former US defence secretary-turned-Halliburton executive was doing lucrative business with the generals who ruled the hydrocarbons-rich South Asian country.
After he became vice presidential candidate in the 2000 race, Cheney’s business deals with the military regime in Myanmar became an obvious issue. His rejoinder was a classic equivocation that surpassed Bill Clinton’s quaint admission of how he smoked marijuana but didn’t inhale!
Interviewed by Larry King towards the end of the 2000 election campaign, Cheney was clear about the importance of being duplicitous. It’s useful to recall his words accurately as they may mean different things on different occasions. For example, they may mean one thing in Myanmar and quite the opposite in Iran later.
“Well, Larry,” he said, “We didn’t support the (Myanmar) regime. We were there because we had competed on a contract to lay some undersea pipeline offshore in Myanmar. It was done through a joint-venture partner. It was fully in compliance with US policy and our conduct around the world; the Halliburton operation is in more that 120 countries, and you have to operate in some very difficult places and oftentimes in countries that are governed in a manner that’s not consistent with our principles here in the United States. But the world’s not made up only of democracies, and everything we did there was totally in compliance with US policy.”
Cheney also said in the interview that he was opposed to policies of economic sanctions against any country, which is not what he is advocating for Iran. At the same time, the normal demonisation of Myanmar has reached a new level, as demonstrations there were given prominent coverage in the western press, as supposed evidence of suppressed opposition to the government breaking out of containment.
In fact, the small demonstrations were, for the first time in many years, economic in nature, protesting the lifting of some of the subsidies for fuel. What is generally left out of the coverage is that the lifting of subsidies was an IMF proposal! Ironically, when the Indonesians lifted their fuel subsidies last year, also under heavy IMF pressure, there were similar demonstrations — but Indonesia was praised by the West for showing courage against ‘populist’ support for the subsidies, and for getting more in line with ‘market prices’.
When the United States and other western nations began mounting a campaign to put Myanmar formally on the Security Council’s agenda in 2005, countries like China, Japan, Russia and Algeria opposed it, saying that the council was intruding in areas beyond its mandate of international peace and security. They argued that other UN bodies, such as the General Assembly, were handling human rights abuses in Myanmar.
India too has exhibited its share of double standards on the question of democracy in Myanmar. It decorated Aung San Suu Kyi with its highest peace award, but intends to continue its engagement with the military junta there despite the ongoing protests against the regime in Yangon.
According to a recent report in the Indian Express, when India lost to China in January in grabbing Myanmar’s gas reserves from A-1 and A-3 blocks, India’s foreign ministry said the loss could have been avoided had the petroleum ministry not given Myanmar the impression that India did not have a serious interest in its energy sector.It dispatched Petroleum Minister Murli Deora to Myanmar, at a time when protests were raging there, ostensibly to witness the signing of production-sharing contracts for another set of deepwater exploration blocks. The Express believes this was a ruse to keep the Myanmar government engaged.
To those who are locked in a struggle for higher issues of democracy and fundamental rights in Myanmar, Pakistan or elsewhere this entire skullduggery may be disconcerting. But the global champions of democracy are much more cynical than we credit them to be. We have seen that whenever it suits them they are willing to anoint Muslim extremists as exalted Mujahideen. On other occasions, they have been quite willing to sacrifice a democratic Aung San Suu Kyi for the promise of lucre as our leaders have shown their willingness to do.
Any project to restore democracy in the Third World, therefore, be it in Algeria or Pakistan or Myanmar, or even in Iraq or Afghanistan, must necessarily have a common force of logic. And what determines this logic? We know what Bill Clinton would say: it’s the economy, stupid.
In this scenario if we assume (though not necessarily concede) that Benazir Bhutto represents a remote replica of a secular Aung San Suu Kyi with all the support of the West, and the liberals at home — does it mean the dice is loaded against the more stridently Islamic leaders perceived as anti-American? If this were true, Bill Clinton would be wrong. But the truth is that liberal idealists and religious extremists are false categories in most essential calculations. What matters is how pliable they are collectively or individually before the dominant global interests. Clinton is most probably right.
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