| The ZIMBABWE Situation | Our
thoughts and prayers are with Zimbabwe - may peace, truth and justice prevail. |
How many poor people have progressives starved since 1917?
It's a good
question and somebody should do the research and publish
it.
Russia was the breadbasket of Europe until progressives seized power
in
that year and started instituting policies to "share the wealth." For
the
next 70 years until socialism collapsed, Russia was a net importer of
food
always on the brink of famine. In the 1930s, Stalin instigated a
calculated
famine in the Ukraine to rid himself of approximately 10 million
political
enemies.
His crime was protected by the progressives at the
New York Times and on
the Pulitzer Prize Committee (they control both
institutions to this day).
Because soft progressives cover for hard-line
progressives like Stalin,
Castro and other political monsters -- preferring
to demonize George Bush
and John Ashcroft instead -- these atrocities
continue.
The left's inability to understand the most basic economic
fact -- that
people need an incentive to produce -- has caused the
unnecessary deaths of
tens of millions of people -- mostly poor -- in the
last 75 years. But
thanks to a politically corrupted media and educational
system, their
pig-headed pursuit of socialist fantasies goes on.
A few
years ago when Robert Mugabe, the leftist dictator of Zimbabwe began
his race
war against white farmers to the cheers of progressives here
(including such
luminaries of the social justice cause as Jesse Jackson and
Al Sharpton), I
had a correspondence with a black journalist friend of mine
who writes for
all the leftist news outlets that pretend to care about black
people but
really care only about their destructive leftwing agendas.
I suggested
that he might get his friends to protest Mugabe's bloody racism
and
brain-dead Marxism before poor black people began starving in Zmibabwe
as a
result of these criminal policies aimed at the most productive segment
of
Zimbabwe's economy.
Naturally my friend defended the murders and thefts
as "social justice" and
turned a blind eye to the racism since it was only
directed against whites,
whose parents of course had been "imperialists." In
this he was expressing
the majority of world progressive opinion, for example
that of the
dictatorships and radical organizations that attended the
Orwellian UN
Conference Against Racism in Durban in September 2001, an orgy
of racist
attacks on whites and Jews.
America and Britain which led
the world in ending slavery and even
attempted (futilely) to end it in Africa
were put in the dock at the UN and
held up for "reparations," while the
Muslim Sudan which maintains slavery
today and the League Of Arab States
whose ancestors enslaved more black
Africans than all the Europeans and
Americans put together were not; Israel
the only democracy in the Middle East
whose Arab citizens have more rights
than Arabs in all the Arab states was
attacked for racism, while the Arab
states which forbid Jews to set foot on
their territory were not.
Now the progressive chickens are coming home to
roost in Zimbabwe. On
Christmas Eve the Wall Street Journal ran a front page
news story on
conditions in Mugabe's Marxist police state. The title of the
Journal story
said it all: "Once a Breadbasket, Now Zimbabwe Can't Feed
Itself." Corn
production -- the staple diet -- has declined by two-thirds in
the last
three years and 6 million Zimbabweans are on the verge of
starvation.
US Ambassador Tony Hall nearly got it right when he said,
"Zimbabwe stands
alone as an example of how a country can be ruined by one
person." Actually,
Zimbabwe is one of many such countries, and it was not
ruined by one person
but by one person supported by a global movement of arch
reactionaries who
call themselves progressives and who have killed 100
million people in the
last century in the name of "social justice" and
learned nothing in the
process.
©2003 FrontPageMag.com
Daily News
Relax, our land is our prosperity
Date:26-Dec, 2003
IN THE first month to Christmas, the
government gave to me:
Police torturing lawyers, judges grabbing
farms, long sugar queues and
inflation of 175 percent. Our leader left for
Indonesia but the TV said to
me, no worries, "Our Land is Our
Prosperity."
In the second month to Christmas, the government gave
to me:
priests in prison, long petrol queues and 8 million needing
world food
aid. Our leader left for Ethiopia, France, Malaysia, Thailand and
Singapore
but the TV said to me, no worries, "Our Land is Our
Prosperity".
In the third month to Christmas, the government gave
to me:
World Cup cricket, black armbands, scores of arrests, women
being
beaten and men having their toenails torn out. Our leader left for
Sudan but
the TV said to me, no worries, "Our Land is Our
Prosperity".
In the fourth month to Christmas, the government gave
to me:
women raped by guns, soldiers beating people and petrol
prices up by
320 percent. Our leader left for South Africa but the TV said to
me, no
worries, "Our Land is Our Prosperity".
In the fifth month
to Christmas, the government gave to me:
no fuel for airplanes,
long electricity cuts, postal workers fired and
inflation of 269 percent. Our
leader left for South Africa and Nigeria but
the TV said to me, no worries,
"Our Land is Our Prosperity".
In the sixth month to Christmas the
government gave to me:
hundreds of arrests, water cannons, riot
police and helicopter
gunships. Our leader left for Libya and Egypt but the
TV said to me, no
worries, "Our Land is Our Prosperity".
In the
seventh month to Christmas the government gave to me:
tripled bread
prices, banks that were broke and more of Mbeki's quiet
diplomacy. Our leader
left for Mocambique and Nigeria but the TV said to me,
no worries, "Our Land
is Our Prosperity."
In the eighth month to Christmas the government
gave to me:
fires on farms, filthy water and police taking my own
money from me.
Our leader left for Swaziland, Malaysia and Tanzania but the
TV said to me,
no worries, "Our Land is Our Prosperity."
In the
ninth month to Christmas the government gave to me:
banning of the
Daily News, journalists in gaol and money with expiry
dates. Our leader left
for Cuba and America but the TV said to me, no
worries, "Our Land is Our
Prosperity."
In the tenth month to Christmas the government gave to
me:
no tractors to plough, no seeds to plant, war vets barricading
the SA
High commissioner and yet more of Mbeki's quiet diplomacy. Our leader
left
for Namibia but the TV said to me, no worries, "Our Land is our
Prosperity."
In the eleventh month to Christmas the government gave
to me:
a billion dollars for a football game, striking nurses and
doctors,
police seizing foreign money and inflation of 526 percent. Our
leader stayed
at home this month but the TV said to me, no worries, "Our Land
is Our
Prosperity."
In the last month to Christmas, the
government gave to me:
permanent exit from the Commonwealth,
Presidential decrees to grab
tractors, 619 percent inflation and 1 000
percent increases in rates, rents
and school fees. Our leader left for
Switzerland, Egypt and Ethiopia but the
TV said to me, no worries, "Our Land
is Our Prosperity."
Happy Christmas Zimbabwe.
By The
Litany Bird
Arizona Republic
Zimbabwe leader's cohorts now show a 'shift in
thinking'
Abraham McLaughlin
Christian Science Monitor
Dec. 26,
2003 12:00 AM
JOHANNESBURG - In his three-year effort to re-engineer
the racial and
economic landscape of Zimbabwe by forcibly taking farms away
from Whites and
giving them to Blacks, President Robert Mugabe has long
counted on, and
gotten, support from almost all of Africa's
leaders.
Until now.
With half of Zimbabwe's 12 million people
facing hunger, inflation over 600
percent and state-sponsored torture a
common tool, hints of criticism by
regional leaders that began showing up
last month have now started to
expand.
Everyone from Nigeria's
President Olesegun Obasanjo to Archbishop Desmond
Tutu has distanced himself
from Mugabe. Even South African President Thabo
Mbeki, his chief regional
supporter, met last week for the first time with
Zimbabwe's main opposition
party. It may all portend greater desire to
resolve southern Africa's biggest
political crisis, and it could hasten the
end of the Mugabe
regime.
"There's been a shift in thinking about Zimbabwe," said Chris
Maroleng, a
researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria,
South Africa.
"We're seeing cracks within the African region's
solidarity."
The fissures first appeared at last month's meeting in
Nigeria of the
54-member Commonwealth, made up of mostly former British
colonies. Seven of
the 18 African members reportedly failed to back South
Africa in an effort
to oust Commonwealth Secretary-General Don McKinnon over
his criticism of
Zimbabwe.
The split vote could give more clout to
Obasanjo, the Commonwealth's current
chairman, who has been less supportive
of the Mugabe regime. He heads a
seven-man team charged with tackling the
Zimbabwe issue.
Even Tutu, who's usually mum on policy matters, has
joined South African
church leaders in criticizing Mbeki's strategy of "quiet
diplomacy" on
Zimbabwe. Tutu said last week that outside help is crucial in
dealing with
repressive regimes. "We could not have defeated apartheid on our
own," he
said, comparing Mugabe's government to South Africa's apartheid-era
rule.
The pressure may be having an impact on Mbeki. His 45-minute
meeting with
leaders of the Movement for Democratic Change, Zimbabwe's main
opposition
party, after a two-hour-plus meeting with Mugabe, elicited
promises from
both sides to restart informal talks. The MDC says Mugabe stole
the 2001
presidential election.
Not that Mbeki has changed his
strategy of quiet diplomacy. In a weekly
letter on his party's Web site, he
intoned that land reform is the central
issue in the Zimbabwe debate and that
Mugabe deserves credit for trying to
rectify inequalities.
Mugabe's
government has hardly changed its approach, either. It recently
announced a
policy allowing confiscation of White farmers' tractors and
other farm
equipment. And despite a court order to the contrary, police this
weekend
forcibly prevented the country's only independent newspaper from
publishing
an edition.
Just three years ago Mugabe's California-sized country was
one of Africa's
economic gems, a lush, functional nation that brought in
thousands of
tourists and exported tons of corn, wheat, oranges, bananas, and
tobacco.
Then Mugabe began trying to rectify one of the most stubborn
legacies of
European colonialism: White-Black economic inequality, a problem
that
troubles many African nations. In Zimbabwe at the time, just 4,000
White
farmers owned roughly one-third of the country's productive
agricultural
land. Now only a handful of White farmers remain.
International Herald Tribune
Across Africa, AIDS ravages youngest
survivors
Sharon LaFraniere NYT
Friday, December 26,
2003
CEMENTO, Mozambique On the day in July that he and his wife died of
AIDS,
Samossoni Nhambo, 36, leaned up from a hospital bed a few kilometers
from
this dirt-road village of thatched huts and asked his preacher a
despairing
question: Who would take care of his children?
Five months
later the answer is glaringly obvious: No one.
Three-year-old Fátima died
in early December, perhaps from AIDS, perhaps
from malnutrition.
Five-year-old João, infested with worms that have reduced
his toes to red
stumps, can walk only on his heels.
His 7- and 9-year-old brothers,
Ricardo and Samsoan, are covered with sores
from scabies mites, which infect
the entire family.
Maria, 16, who dropped out of school to care for her
sick parents, became
pregnant by a man whom she refuses to identify. In early
December she gave
birth to a boy.
That leaves the eldest, José, a
17-year-old who just finished seventh grade,
as the surrogate father. In
their half-built shelter of stones and sticks on
the bad side of a poor
village, with no walls and a single cane chair for
furniture, the Nhambo
children reel from crisis to crisis.
"Life is very difficult," José said.
"No food, no clothing, no bed covers.
We have to struggle."
Southern
Africa is increasingly home to children like the Nhambos, robbed of
their
childhood by AIDS and staggering under adult-size hardships.
Unicef, the
United Nations Children's Fund, estimates in a new report that
11 million
children under 15 in sub-Saharan Africa have lost at least one
parent to
AIDS.
About a third of those have lost both parents. By 2010, Unicef
says, AIDS
will have claimed at least one of the parents of 15 percent of the
region's
children - 20 million in all.
The social implications are
enormous, relief organizations say. Orphans are
more likely to drop out of
school, to suffer from chronic malnutrition, to
live on the street, to be
exploited by adults, to turn to prostitution and
crime and to become infected
with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
African social traditions dictate
that relatives should take them in. But
AIDS has pushed so many families to
the brink that the surviving adults are
beginning to turn away their young
relatives. An aunt and a grandfather live
down a dirt path from the Nhambos,
but the grandfather says neither can help
them.
So far, governments
have done little. Of 40 sub-Saharan countries hit by
AIDS, only six have
plans in place to deal with orphans, Unicef says. Their
sheer numbers, plus
the state of African bureaucracies, make even the simple
act of registering
orphans so that they can be exempted from school fees a
mammoth
task.
In Mozambique, orphans are not a new phenomenon. When 17 years of
civil war
finally ended in 1992, hundreds of thousands of children were left
without
one or both parents.
But AIDS has sharply multiplied their
ranks. Now, in a nation of 18 million,
16 percent of the children - more than
1.2 million - are missing at least
one parent. AIDS is responsible for a
third of the deaths, according to
Unicef.
Maria Cemedo, an official at
an agency that serves women and children in
Sofala, the region where the
Nhambo children live, said an entire generation
was being lost. "We may
become a society of old people and children," she
said.
Sofala, in
Mozambique's narrow center, has been hard hit because it has both
a port and
a major highway running to Zimbabwe. The combination of
poverty-stricken
women and lonely truckers spreads HIV all along the
corridor. Now a quarter
of adults in the province are infected.
Of the 46,000 registered orphans
in the province, said Antônia Charre, the
agency's director, few receive any
government help. Fewer than 5 percent
obtain food through the World Food
Program, she said.
"It is not clear how some of these children survive
from one day to the
next," she said.
Group homes are one possible
solution. But as yet, few exist here. The
government's only orphanage - by
far the largest in this region - houses
just 78 boys and girls. Paula
Salgado, its coordinator, said 16 children
infected with HIV were housed this
year at the center in Beira, the nation's
second-biggest city. Only four
survive today.
One of them, Mavis, 5, was taken to the center by
government workers in late
October, weighing just 11 kilograms, or 24 pounds,
and suffering from
tuberculosis. Her parents were dead, apparently from AIDS,
and her
15-year-old brother was reduced to begging for food from neighbors,
Salgado
said.
Such stories of separation and suffering seem as common
as mango trees here.
About 100 kilometers, or 60 miles, away, in the village
of Nhamatanda, Jorge
Danielle, 15, said he had cared for his two younger
sisters for four years
after his mother died of AIDS.
Then, quite
recently, a couple who claimed to be friends of his dead parents
took the 9-
and 12-year-old girls away, he said. He now lives alone and
survives on
handouts of rice and the pennies he earns by carrying parcels at
the local
market.
"They told me, 'We cannot feed you too, so you must fend for
yourself,'" he
said. "I am very sad because they are far away from me. Now I
am always
alone."
Amador Ernesto Luís, a volunteer with a
Unicef-financed relief group called
Asvimo, said he feared the two girls had
been taken away for labor or
prostitution. But without relatives to care for
the children, and in the
absence of government help, he said he was powerless
to stop the couple.
The Nhambo children remain together. But there are
few other blessings in
their lives. Their hut was always on the bad side of
Cemento, far from the
highway and the single hand-pumped well that serves 600
people. The Nhambos
fed their children rice and sweet potatoes they grew in a
tiny kitchen
garden.
Nhambo never held a steady job. His wife,
Caterina Tole, held the family
together, said José Missasse, a Christian
pastor who knew the family well.
Their family life began to fall apart
five years ago, when Samossoni Nhambo
left to live with the wife of a
deceased uncle. When he returned, in 1999,
José said, he and Maria, the
eldest children, were not happy to see him. Nor
was his mother, he said.
"They very seldom spoke," he said.
In African culture, a woman is obliged
to meet her husband's sexual demands,
and so Fátima was born within a year.
Missasse, the pastor, said he later
recognized the symptoms of AIDS in both
parents and the baby.
He said he had seen Caterina Tole a month before
her death. "She never
forgave her husband," he said. "She said, 'I am going
to die because of him
and leave my children alone.'"
Tole died one
morning in mid-July, stretched out on the dirt floor of her
neighbor's mud
hut. Six hours later, Nhambo, too, stopped breathing.
No one offered to
feed the children - not their mother's sister, who lives
with her seven
children about 50 paces away, nor their widowed grandfather,
a frail
70-year-old in ragtag clothes.
The children eat one meal a day of corn
porridge, along with 70 other needy
children at Missasse's
church.
José said he had planned to carry Fátima on foot to the nearest
doctor when
he woke up on Dec. 10, surprised she had not aroused him as usual
with her
crying.
Neighbors buried her in an unmarked grave between her
parents.
Exactly a week later, Maria delivered a baby boy, and the
scramble to feed
another mouth began.
The New York Times
Comment from ZWNEWS, 26 December
Listening with one ear open
The extraordinary events that have followed the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting deserve very serious consideration. In particular, the position adopted by the South African President needs to be clearly understood, and the misinformation contained in his letter to the ANC corrected. The same goes for the defence offered by Aziz Pahad.
President Mbeki makes a number of assertions in his letter that cannot go unchallenged. The first of these is extremely serious and relates to the results of the Presidential Election. It should be borne in mind that the mandate given to the Troika by the Coolum CHOGM followed a detailed statement from the Commonwealth Ministers Action Group in January 2002, exhorting the Zimbabwe government to ensure that the forthcoming presidential election meet the criteria of being free and fair. CMAG requested that the Zimbabwe government take a number of steps to ensure this:
So much for there being a contradiction between the Commonwealth Observer Group and the South African observers. The clash of views is as much between the ANC and other South African parties as it is between the ANC and the Commonwealth Observer Group.
Mbeki goes on to comment that the Zimbabwe government has never been given an opportunity to deal with the conclusions of the Commonwealth Observer Group, which again misses the point completely. The mandate given to the Troika explicitly required that the Zimbabwe government engage with the Commonwealth through the office of the Secretary-General, and, as the Troika stated: "The Committee mandated the Commonwealth Secretary-General to engage with the Government of Zimbabwe to ensure that the specific recommendations from the Commonwealth Observer Group Report, notably on the management of future elections, in Zimbabwe are implemented". This the Zimbabwe Government steadfastly refused to do, and undoubtedly this failure would have been contained in the report given to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting by the Secretary-General. The failure of the Zimbabwe Government to honour its commitment to the Harare Declaration and the Millbrook Commonwealth Action Programme would have been a point of serious consideration. The suspension may have been unpalatable to both Mbeki and Mugabe, but was explicitly requested by all other Zimbabwean groupings. The MDC, the ZCTU and the Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition had all called for continued suspension, and thus we are entitled to ask on whose behalf Mbeki and SADC were acting in challenging the CHOGM decision. It would appear to be Zanu PF alone, and hence the credentials for South Africa and SADC being non-partisan are now deeply questionable.
Mbeki next deals with the issue of the land, and whilst he is accurate in the sequence of events, he sidesteps entirely the whole problem of the violence, illegality, and the devastating humanitarian consequences of the Zimbabwe government’s land grab. Aziz Pahad rightly points out that the South African government has raised concerns about the legality and the manner of the Zimbabwe land grab, but tellingly makes no reference to South African government statements about the gross human rights violations that have been committed in Zimbabwe over the past three years. It these human rights violations as much as the land grab that have led to the concerns of the Commonwealth, and the statements of CMAG, the Commonwealth Observer Group, and the minority parties in the South African Observer Mission all make this point. But the point is that this is again raising a partial truth. It is a matter of public record that all Zimbabweans agree on the need for land reform, and Mbeki and SADC know this very well. So it is disturbing to hear the South African President and his Deputy Foreign Minister repeat the old Zanu PF litany. Once again Zimbabweans are entitled to question the motives of the South African Government, and in the context of the CHOGM debacle, to ask which Zimbabweans he seeks to assist. From the perspective of many Zimbabweans, we may take less exception with Alister Sparks’ analysis than Aziz Pahad.
But, most disturbing of all, is the subtle way in which Mbeki seeks to de-link fraudulent elections and gross human rights violations. His suggestion that the gross human rights violations occurring in Zimbabwe have been spun out of proportion by a Western alliance in order to effect regime change is outrageous in the light of all the evidence that has accrued over the past three years. When all the evidence suggests a deliberate campaign of politicide in defense of maintaining political power, it is insulting in the extreme to all Zimbabweans for the South African President to insinuate that the response to these allegations is a cynical inflation by Western nations to effect regime change. It is more dangerous to deflate allegations of gross human rights violations than to inflate them, as the world has learned to its cost in Rwanda. The South African Government has yet to match the concerns of the wider international community with similar statements of concern, and now Mbeki even suggests that the allegations of gross human rights violations are merely the stories told by the former oppressors in order to vilify the "heroes of the liberation struggle". We know that we are advised not to take Mbeki "literally", but we cannot take him seriously if he seeks to mislead. If Mbeki and SADC wish to be the arbiters of a Zimbabwean future, then it behoves them to listen to all sides. And when the South African President claims that Zimbabweans must solve their own problems, he needs to reflect all opinions equally in order to foster any possible solution. To be an honest broker, he must give an ear to all sides of the problem, and, when he does this, he will not be led into the ridiculous posturing that has followed CHOGM. He would do well to take Ngugi’s advice, and not sit on the back of Zimbabwe.
[ENDS]
Jerusalem Post
Dec. 25, 2003
The march of freedom
By MAX M.
KAMPELMAN
Israel is today the only democracy in the Middle East. It
was, after all,
the ancient Hebrew tribes who proclaimed with the Biblical
Abraham that
there was only one God. The Sh'ma Yisrael prayer is considered
to be the
essence of Judaism, a belief which logically assumes that human
beings, as
children of God, are brothers and sisters to one another, the
premise upon
which political democracy is built. This astute insight has
steadily, albeit
haltingly, permeated our civilization.
The process
has understandably met resistance over the centuries. People
with power -
religious, economic, political - do not wish to lose their
privileges, but
with time, sacrifice and persistent effort, that resistance
has steadily been
defeated over the years. Israel is today on the front
lines in that battle
for democracy and human decency for all. History tells
us that it will
prevail. The president of the United States gives evidence
of understanding
the nature and vital importance of achieving that victory
for
democracy.
How is this global battle for freedom doing so far? For more
than 30 years,
Freedom House (www.freedomhouse.org) has been publishing
a global report
card on freedom's condition. In its early years, the survey's
findings were
sobering. Freedom was restricted to Western Europe, North
America, and a
scattering of other countries, such as Israel and Australia.
Subsequently,
the survey registered wave after wave of democratic progress,
beginning in
Latin America, proceeding to the former Communist world, and
moving from
there to Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
Freedom's progress
has continued despite internal conflicts and civil wars,
the collapse of
Asian economies, and more recently the escalation of terror
attacks. Freedom
has not simply made progress; it has shown an
impressive
durability.
At the end of 2003, Freedom House reports 88
countries as free societies,
with a wide range of rights and liberties,
representing 44 percent of the
world's population. Another 55 countries are
partly free, while 49 are
identified as not free, representing 35 percent of
the global population,
primary those living in China.
THERE ARE many
reasons for freedom's growth and the rejection of
dictatorship and autocracy.
I would, however, emphasize a crucial
development: the increasingly serious
incorporation of democracy promotion
in the foreign policies of the United
States, the European Union, and other
important transnational
bodies.
The movement to include democracy building as an important
element of
foreign policy was strengthening in 1983, with the founding of the
US
National Endowment of Democracy. NED's mission has been to
provide
assistance to independent publications, civic movements, trade
unions, and
other groups that were engaged in freedom struggles in autocratic
societies.
Its beneficiaries played an important role in the peaceful
toppling of
Communist power and in the attainment of democracy.
In
subsequent years, the role of democracy promotion became an accepted part
of
American foreign policy priorities. In an especially notable development,
the
Bush administration has inserted democracy criteria directly into its
foreign
aid program through what is called the Millennium Challenge Account,
which
provides additional assistance to poor countries that show progress
towards
the expansion of democratic freedoms.
There are, as one might imagine,
inconsistencies in the way these policies
are carried out. In many cases,
geopolitics still trumps freedom. But the
momentum is very much in the right
direction.
Other countries have adopted similar pro-democracy policies,
especially the
countries of the European Union. Added to this is the role of
regional or
international bodies. It was important, in this regard, for the
Commonwealth
to have suspended and isolated Zimbabwe because of the Mugabe
regime's
ruinous policies. Likewise, the Organization of American States in
Latin
America has come down firmly on the side of democracy, an
important
development at a time when freedom is under growing economic
pressure.
This brings us back to the one sad chapter in this year's
freedom survey:
the Middle East. Although Freedom House has found evidence of
modest
improvement over the past few years, the Middle East remains the one
region
that has resisted the march of freedom. Israel is the only country in
the
region that enjoys the ranking of free; otherwise, the Middle East
shows
five partly free societies and 12 societies that are not free
including
Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Syria who receive the lowest possible
freedom
score.
The reasons for the Middle East's failure to embrace
liberty are complex.
Whereas Judaism and Christianity have earlier
experienced "reformation," the
youngest of the major religious groups, Islam,
has only recently shown signs
of engaging in that process. An additional
factor has been the unwillingness
of the Western democracies to apply the
same standards to the oil-laden
Middle East as they apply to other
regions.
Compounding this problem is the absence of a regional entity
that has the
cultivation of freedom as part of its mission. Instead, the
authoritarian
governments of the region mutually reinforce each other and
treat democratic
ferment as a threat.
Despite this hostile
environment, the advocates of freedom continue to press
ahead in their
struggle for a free and honest press, the rights of women,
fair elections and
other reforms. They are our allies and deserve our
support.
At the
same time, we should begin to consider ways by which at least some
countries
of the Middle East can be incorporated into broad, supra-national
entities,
such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
(OSCE), which
emphasizes the indispensability of democracy and human rights
for "security."
The recent creation of the Community of Democracies with a
membership of more
than 100 states, including Israel, is an additional sign
of democratic
movement in the world.
The major impetus for democratic reform must, of
course, come from inside a
country. But recent history clearly demonstrates
that rewards, punishments,
and honest counsel from the outside world can be
critical. Until now, the
outside world has evaded its responsibilities in the
Middle East. The
Freedom House survey is a timely reminder that major
challenges as well as
opportunities lie ahead for Israel, for the people of
the Middle East and
for the broad community of world democracies.
The
writer, a former counselor of the State Department, is chairman emeritus
of
Freedom House, the American Academy of Diplomacy, and the United
States
Institute of Peace.