When democracy favours fundamentalists

By Thalif Deen at the united nations

NEW YORK - The lead para in a mock news story next December may well read something like this: "In another major electoral victory, religious fundamentalists succeeded in gaining the country's presidency by an overwhelming margin." The spoof was meant to be a dire prediction of a future presidential election, not in Iran, Algeria, Lebanon or Palestine, but in the United States.

As Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, won the Republican Iowa caucuses in a big voter turnout last week, there are fears in some political circles that if the ruling party wins the presidency, the victor may well be a fundamentalist by instinct -- if not by faith.

Huckabee plays with the Mama Kicks bands lead singer Lisa Guyer during a campaign stop in Henniker, N.H., on Friday. AP

And the irony of it is that it's the same type of fundamentalists the US refuses to deal with in the Islamic world. How different is a Christian fundamentalist from an Islamic or a Jewish fundamentalist? Although a Democrat is most likely to win the presidential elections come December, no one is ruling out an unlikely victory by Huckabee, a pulpit preacher who has the support of right wing conservative Christians, and who attributes his sudden popularity in the polls to "divine intervention."

But outside of the United States, one of the biggest foreign policy nightmares is how Washington is going to cope with right wing fundamentalists being elected to power worldwide through multi-party democracy. To the US, the democratic process is virtually infallible, but the results are seemingly tainted.

The trend setter was the victory of the Islamic Salvation Front (known by its French acronym FIS), a fundamentalist Muslim party, that won the first round of elections in Algeria in December 1991. Fearing the worst, the Algerian military cancelled the second round of elections to prevent the ISF from coming to power. The army, which subsequently took over the reins of power, had the tacit support of Western nations, which under normal circumstances would have imposed sanctions on the military government or ostracized it internationally, for its anti-democracy stand.

But Algeria has never been the same after the FIS was deprived of victory, triggering violence and suicide attacks on an illegitimate government sustained by the army and condoned by Western nations, including the US and the 27-member European Union. In its determination to spread multi-party democracy, particularly in the Middle East, the Western world supported the elections in Lebanon back in June 2005. But the armed Shiite militia group, Hezbollah, and its political allies, won the election in southern Lebanon.

The electoral victory of Hezbollah, which is labeled a "terrorist organisation" by the US and Israel, was a major disappointment. The fact that Hezbollah is backed by Syria and Iran, two countries the State Department categorizes as "terrorist states", is another setback to US policy makers. Similarly, the Palestinians held multi-party elections in January 2006, resulting in an electoral victory for Hamas.

Both the US and Israel have refused to deal with Hamas-- until it renounces violence-- although the Palestinian party has a legitimately elected government in Israeli-occupied Gaza. Outside of the Middle East, there was also a "darker" side for democracy in the Indian sub-continent when voters overwhelmingly re-elected Narendra Modi, described as an incendiary politician, as chief minister of the western state of Gujarat.

At the elections held last month, Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) captured 117 seats in the 182-member legislature thereby inflicting a resounding defeat to the ruling Congress Party in India. Modi has been accused of turning a blind eye when Hindu mobs went on a rampage in February 2002 killing at least a thousand Muslims following a mysterious fire that killed about 50 people in a train carrying members of a Hindu nationalist organisation.

Modi's victory is a dilemma for the Bush administration which denied him a visa to enter the US, on grounds of violating religious freedom. As a result of the BJP victory in Gujarat, the Congress Party may have second thoughts about holding early elections before its five-year term expires in mid-2009.

In the event the BJP wins national elections next year, the US may have to deal with a Hindi supremacist party in India, along with Islamic fundamentalists in Lebanon, Algeria, Iran and Palestine--- all of them voted to power in democratic elections.