31st October 1999

UN gets tough with
military regimes

The late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had not only declared emergency rule and thrown some of her opponents in jail but also imposed censorship and clamped down on press freedom.

Alarmed by the unfolding political events in India, then US President Gerald Ford summoned his UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan, now a senior Senator in Congress, to seek advise.

"Look at it this way, Mr. President" remarked Moynihan, perhaps half-seriously and half-jokingly, "Under your Administration, the United States has become the world's largest democracy."

But recent events in Pakistan, on the other hand, have left the US where it is: only the world's second largest democracy, after India.

The US, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the Commonwealth have all reacted strongly to the newly-established military government in Pakistan.

The upcoming Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in South Africa in early November will decide whether to suspend Pakistan from a 54-member institution which, for all intents and purposes, is dominated by four Western nations: Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

The Western argument has always been that all military governments are necessarily evil — and all multi-party democracies necessarily good. But this is far from the political realities in the ground.

Even the US, which condemned the end of democracy in Pakistan, has not— even in one of its weakest moments— demanded that the "democratic government" of Prime Minister Nawaz Shariff be restored to power.

Obviously, the Clinton Administration cannot be seen mollycoddling a military government — even though the US in the past is known to have played ball with dozens of Asian, African and Latin American dictators.

When Anastasio Somoza's ruthless government was holding sway in Nicaragua in the late 1960s, then US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was asked why Washington was cozying upto a dictator.

''He may be a son-of-a-bitch," said Dulles with characteristic American arrogance, "but he is OUR son-of-a-bitch."

The new military government in Pakistan, which includes several civilian cabinet ministers, has pledged to clean up a monumental mess left behind by a highly corrupt democratic government.

If it succeeds, it may undermine the long-standing argument that all men in khaki fatigues are necessarily bad. Only time will tell. Military intelligence, after all, is considered an oxymoron.

But still, with the widespread Western agitation for good governance and transparency, military leaders these days are under pressure to abandon their uniforms and slip into business suits.

And this is precisely what is happening in some African countries where military leaders, under threats from the West, are rigging elections, stuffing ballot boxes, and returning to power as civilians in so-called multi-party democracies.

At its last summit meeting in Algiers in July, the 53-member Organisation of African Unity (OAU) decided that heads of military regimes will be barred from its next summit.

It is the first time that such a drastic measure was taken by a regional organisation, although the Commonwealth has suspended several military governments, the last one being the former Nigerian government.

This anti-military trend is now beginning to infiltrate the world's foremost political body: the United Nations.

Last month Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he is hoping the UN will one day follow Africa's lead and shut out all "unconstitutional" governments from high-level meetings of world political leaders.

Annan said the OAU decision was a "welcome change from an earlier era - the principle that governments which come to power through unconstitutional means could no longer expect to be received as equals in an assembly of elected heads of State."

"I am sure the day will come," he exclaimed, "when the General Assembly of the United Nations will follow Africa's lead, and apply similarly stringent standards to all its (188) members."