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Democracy and Rule of Law - June/July 2009

Why Obama’s Ghana Speech Comes at a Time of New Hope for Africa

John Lyman June/July 2009
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President Obama's July 11 Speech in GhanaDEVELOPMENTS

 

President Obama went to Ghana this past July on his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa since becoming president.  Obama chose to visit Ghana partly because it is a stable democratic country, with a growing economy relatively free of political corruption.  The choice conveyed his message that the continent had the potential to overcome the corruption and mismanagement that holds back much of the region and that frustrates major aid donors and potential foreign investors.  Comments concerning poor governance from previous U.S. presidents have sometimes been seen as paternalistic.  But by complimenting Ghana’s progress, and through the perceived credibility that comes with having a cultural connection to the continent, by virtue of his Kenyan father, Obama conveyed a message that has been met with a rapturous response on the ground in Africa. 

Many in the international community have wrongly mislabeled Africa as a failed continent.  Certainly, there are several parts of the continent that are well known for their dependence on foreign aid agencies and international donor conferences.  In the past, many Africans felt the U.S. lacked the moral authority to criticize African governance because of a long history of inconsistent support for democracy and accountability compared to other U.S. strategic interests.  These perceptions brought about a general sense that U.S. governments were indifferent to Africa and its needs.  Many of these assumptions appear to have evaporated with the election of Mr. Obama.  

 

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A View From the Ground in Honduras: Honduran Civil Society Leader on the Constitutional Crisis

Adam Benz, Senior Editor of Foreign Policy Digest June/July 2009
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The following are excerpts from a July 9 interview with Ian Merriam, an independent Honduran businessperson. Mr. Merriam's longstanding interest in Honduran civil society led him to be selected as a Central American Leadership Fellow by the Aspen Institute, a respected bipartisan think-tank. Recently, Mr. Merriam’s leadership role in the Union Civica Democratica (Democratic Civic Union, or UCD), an influential civil society organization that has strongly supported the ouster of Honduras’s president, Manuel Zelaya, has placed him at the forefront of the political and constitutional crisis over the Honduran presidency.

In an exclusive interview with Foreign Policy Digest, Mr. Merriam set forth the legal and political arguments in support of the ouster and the interim government’s position in mediating the crises, as well as offering arguments against what he claims to have been inaccurate and unbalanced response to the crisis by international institutions and the media.  Mr. Meriam also described the conditions on the ground in Honduras, where he has witnessed firsthand the deteriorating political environment that led to President Zelaya’s ouster and its tumultuous aftermath.

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Who Will Stand for Rule of Law in Honduras?

Adam R. Benz June/July 2009
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Manuel ZelayaDEVELOPMENTS

Ever since the Honduran president Manuel  Zelaya was arrested in the middle of the night and flown out of his country by military officers less than a month ago, the small country of Honduras has received enormous international attention for been widely reported as the first Central American coup in almost two decades. There has been a strong stated desire by all the major outside players to this crisis not to allow for a repeat of Latin America’s plagued history of military coups being used to respond to constitutional crises. The international response has offered a rare opportunity for a united common front between the Obama administration, Latin American states across the political spectrum, and international institutions such as the United Nations and the Organization of American States (OAS).

Undoubtedly, the speed, unity, and forcefulness that have defined the international response to Zelaya’s ouster has marked a significant milestone for democratic governance in the Americas. This is true especially when one considers that for much of the Twentieth Century, foreign policy in Latin America was largely guided by an emphasis on protecting internal sovereignty, ostensibly to preserve equality between states of unequal power but which in practice often permitted despotic regimes to abuse their citizens without being held accountable by their neighbors. For that matter, it also marks a departure from much of the history of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, which often placed more importance on defending U.S. interests over that of supporting its Latin American neighbors’ democratic aspirations. It has been made abundantly clear by all parties involved that the idea of a coup is no longer an acceptable political option in the Americas today. 

However, some important questions have been lost in the rush to condemn Zelaya’s ouster. First and foremost is whether or not Zelaya’s ouster  in fact constituted a classic textbook military coup perpetrated by a disgruntled oligarchy without any legal basis, as Zelaya and his supporters argue, or a legitimate product of the Honduran political process, as claimed by supporters of the current Honduran government led by interim president Roberto Micheletti . The answer most likely lies in neither of these views, but somewhere in between. Yet if the US wants to protect democracy and rule of law in Honduras in the long run, it must look beyond the ouster itself to examine the political and legal processes that gave rise to the conflict in the first place.

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Identity Crisis in Pakistan

Sheheryar Kabraji June/July 2009
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DEVELOPMENTS

Pakistan is at war: after decades of ambivalence the Pakistan Army has engaged the spawn of its Cold War tryst with the USA, the Taliban, in a fight-to-the-death among the peaks and valleys of the country’s far North West.   

The first result of this engagement is the largest displacement of South Asians since that which accompanied the partition of India in 1947—over three million men, women and children in teeming, makeshift camps.   

The second is that groups affiliated with the Taliban now engage in near-daily suicide attacks against government and civilian targets, ruthlessly killing all those who oppose them, and a fair few who would sympathize with them if they were ever given the chance to speak.  

And third: while public opinion across Pakistan has come to support military action, the war has significantly sharpened the crisis of identity that has plagued Pakistan from its birth.  For decades, Pakistanis had been told (and sometimes believed) that Islamic militants posed no threat to their society and were a source of “strategic depth” in case of an Indian attack. As such, the debate over how to tackle the Taliban has become part of the broader question of what kind of society and nation-state Pakistan should be. In order to lend a new perspective to this question, we will provide a summary of the two most influential Pakistani founding narratives and briefly propose an interpretation that might help to resolve Pakistan’s ongoing identity crisis. 

BACKGROUND

The founder-creator of Pakistan (and the divider of India) was Mohammad Ali Jinnah, known in Pakistan as the Quaid e Azam or “Great Leader”. Jinnah spent most of his political career working towards an inter-communal arrangement for an independent and unified Indian state. In his late middle age, however, he became a champion of Muslim separatism on the basis of the “Two-Nation Theory”; a theory which describes the Hindus and Muslims of the Indian subcontinent as two nations, separated by religion and culture, defined by their opposition to another, and unable to coexist within a single state.   

At the same time, however, Jinnah clearly never imagined Pakistan as either a theocratic or a religious state. On the eve of Partition, before the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, Jinnah declared: 
 

You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the State. 

The apparent contradiction between Jinnah’s demand for a separate state on the basis of religious difference and his pluralistic declaration once that state was won is at the root of Pakistan’s identity crisis. The existence of this contradiction divided Jinnah’s audience and Pakistani opinion ever since.  And while the calls for an Islamic State were (and continue to be) led by the Jamaat-e-Islami, a party which began in its life in opposition to “secular” Jinnah and his Pakistan, the story of Pakistan’s manifest destiny as an Islamic state proved the easier sell, and thus that is the story that has made it into the textbooks.  

By the constitution’s third iteration in 1973 (the brainchild of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, father of Benazir Bhutto) Islam was the state religion and various provisions stamped the slogans of Islam all over the apparatus and business of state.  These included establishing a definition of Muslim-hood that excommunicated the entire Ahmedi community.   The state now became the arbiter of who was to be considered ‘Muslim’—a dangerous and divisive development.  Since then governments, both civilian and military, have championed their ‘Islamic reforms’ as evidence of their commitment to an Islamic Pakistan. 

In 1979, after deposing and executing Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, General Zia ul Haq launched a sweeping programme of Islamization which aimed to replace the kaleidoscope of Pakistani society with the monochrome of Wahabi Islam, imported from Saudi Arabia.  Zia’s used Islamic identity to emphasize the differences between Pakistanis and their enemies du jour.; the ‘godless’ Soviet forces in Afghanistan, the ‘pagan’ Indian forces in Kashmir, and the ‘apostate’ local groups that opposed his regime. 

However, Zia’s religious prescription for Pakistan’s identity crisis did nothing to dilute the tribal allegiances, feudal ties and ethnic distinctions1 which still form the primary prism through which Pakistanis identify each other and themselves.  Instead, his programme multiplied the fault lines already present; pitting Sunni against Shia and folk religionists against puritans. In the end, Zia’s desire to create a national consciousness based primarily on a specific interpretation of Islam engendered intolerance, xenophobia and stunted the development of a genuinely unifying national identity.. 

 

ANALYSIS

In order to develop an effective national identity and tackle Islamic militancy, Pakistanis must reach a consensus on the meaning of their state, the source of its moral authority, and the values and beliefs that it must uphold.  The slogan of Islam has failed to provide this meaning. 

Instead, Pakistanis would do well to recall that the Pakistan Movement was inspired by the unifying theme of Jinnah’s career: his belief that the rights and aspirations of minorities must be protected against the tyranny of the majority. Jinnah envisioned Pakistan as a society where the rule of law protected fundamental rights and guaranteed opportunities to every citizen of the state. Making this principle the basis of all state functions would help to eliminate the religious, ethnic, gender, and economic divisions that underlie the many grievances within Pakistani society and have contributed to rise of Islamic militancy. 

The international community can play a vital role in aiding the development of a more inclusive Pakistani identity by supporting the civil institutions that guarantee individual rights and reverse decades of miseducation designed to breed hostility and prejudice.  Pakistanis must work to eliminate agents and attitudes within government and civil society that wish to perpetuate the divisive politics of communalism and religious intolerance.  Together these efforts can realize Jinnah’s vision of an inclusive society that truly represents the rich diversity of peoples and opinions that is Pakistan.

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Sheheryar Kabraji is a physician at the Royal Free Hospital, London, U.K.  He is writing in is personal capacity. He gratefully acknowledges the substantial intellectual and editorial input of Mr. Sofyan Sultan M.A., and Mr. Shahpur Kabraji M.A.

 

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