If a just, free and fair society has prevailed in the world so far, it is democracy that has played a key role in sustaining it. The essential features of democracy include representative government, judicial and media freedom, human rights and the rule of law, transparency and accountability and continuing moves towards the more equitable distribution of wealth and resources among the people.
Despite deceptions and distortions, democracy has contributed much towards the practical wellbeing and welfare of the people and gone beyond mere theory or concept. Unfortunately, the self-styled champions of democracy mainly in the West have often turned out to be self-righteous or sanctimonious, if not whitewashed sepulchres, preaching often from rooftops but practising little.
Despite those double standards or aberrations, history has proved, beyond reasonable doubt, that democracy is the only way towards sustainable development for all the people while dictatorships and dubious democracies have ended in history's dustbins as we saw in Marcos's Philippines, Mugabe's Zimbabwe and other places.
Sri Lankan leaders need to be aware of this, while they speak out against the hypocrisy of the West.
While the United States claims to be the high priest of democracy, though often being exposed for indulging in the worst form of devilry, the most recent cases of Western hypocrisy were highlighted in Britain and France recently. They are powerful members of the European Union, which in recent months has been highly critical of Sri Lanka and suspended the General System of Preferences (GSP) Plus concessions for Sri Lanka’s exports because of our alleged violations of human rights and humanitarian laws here.
According to recent media reports electronic records on the activities of British troops in Afghanistan are routinely wiped from computers when they return to Britain, creating a gap in the documentation of soldiers' actions. Legal experts believe the practice smacks of "cover-up". The Ministry of Defence confirmed on October 4 it had no clear method of preserving the facts and figures relating to what British soldiers did or did not do in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In this digital age when almost anything and everything is possible, such explanations are an insult to intelligence of even ordinary people.
Birmingham-based Public Interest Lawyers spokesperson Phil Shiner who has fought legal battles to force the British Defence Ministry to disclose documents relating to alleged mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq by British forces, claimed that in one case a British Army officer threw two laptop computers storing pictures of 20 dead Iraqis overboard from a cross-Channel ferry.
He said it was reckless and for the ministry to wipe them all was a clear case of cover-up. "I cannot believe that there is some benign explanation for bringing computers home and then purging them. It's a bit like chucking them off a cross-Channel ferry," he said while British leaders stand tall in the pulpit of those who are preaching about alleged war crimes in Sri Lanka and strongly supporting moves by the United Nations to make Sri Lanka accountable to an international war crimes tribunal as it was done in the case of former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and others.
The major difference between the cases of Britain and Sri Lanka are that while democracy and media freedom ensure that human rights violations are exposed, Sri Lankan authorities appear to believe they could overcome the problem by suppressing it or threatening those who dare to speak out.
One example is the recent police action against what they saw as the printing or pasting of anti-government posters relating to the explosive case of the rigorous imprisonment of the Army's former commander, Sarath Fonseka, once hailed by government leaders themselves as the best commander in the world, but now locked up with common criminals after a military hearing which many believed bordered on a case of justice being hurried and thus miscarried.
Like the US and Britain, France also is regarded as a cradle of liberty and democracy after the people's revolution of 1789. Yet in recent months, France's President Nicolas Sarkozy has been involved in a virtual war of words with European Union's Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding over the evacuation, deportation or expulsion of some 8,300 Romas, commonly known as gypsies, to Romania and Bulgaria over the past few months. Last year, France reportedly deported some 10,000 Romas, giving them a meagre $ 400 each.
The European Union's Justice Commissioner has described this move as being similar to what Hitler's Nazi's did to the Jews and the gypsies but the French president and the government have angrily rejected the allegations and the comparisons. According to latest reports in the widely-read-and-respected French newspaper Le Monde, French police are keeping secret lists of Roma and other travelling minorities in breach of laws on ethnic profiling.
The French news agency AFP also said it had seen a formal complaint made to this effect by lawyers for rights groups. The complaint cites what it calls "illegal" and "undeclared" documents held by the Central Office for the Fight Against Itinerant Delinquency (OCLDI), a state body run by gendarmes, France's paramilitary police.
According to the text of the complaint lodged by the groups, the office compiled documents that aimed to "make a genealogy of Gypsy families." To do so "seems to be possible only by the use of a file" based on ethnic origin, it said.
Such is the record of Britain and France which in the last months of the war sent their foreign ministers David Miliband and Bernard Kouchner to stop alleged human rights violations or crimes against civilians.
So while Sri Lankan government leaders do not take the preaching or the puritanical platitudes of western governments too seriously, we need to be aware that checks and balances of strong institutions such as the free media, the independent judiciary, the independent elections, police and public service, a strong opposition and bodies to tackle bribery and corruption, are vibrantly functioning in most countries of the West, despite the double standards of their governments.
Such institutions or checks and balances need to work and work well in Sri Lanka if democracy is to survive. Historical social science has overwhelming evidence that the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy and not subtle or subversive attempts to strangle it. |
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