Human rights and good governance should be linked to foreign investment and aid, writes Ayman El-Amir* Myanmar's recent crisis, ignited by the brutal suppression of the country's peaceful demonstrators led by monks, rang alarm bells to remind the world of its oldest and most sinister ailment -- the terror of dictatorship. The military crackdown on civilian protesters demanding democratic rule was so harsh that the issue was forced under the attention of the UN Security Council. US-led Western powers wanted a resolution, but China balked and brandished a veto. The council ended up with a squeamish presidential statement deploring the violence, and the military junta in Rangoon reacted by "deeply regreting" the statement. The Rangoon junta appeared surprised that the august Security Council should deviate from its task of securing international peace and security to deal with a domestic issue of law and order. By its symbolic action, the Security Council at least focussed the world's attention on a problem that could indeed endanger international peace and security. On another front, the world has come a long way towards recognition and punishment of the crime of genocide, particularly because of the Holocaust. It became a designation reserved exclusively for the Nazi genocide against Jews in Germany and in other countries it conquered during World War II. That was how Nazi war criminals were hunted down all over the world for over 50 years. Other hate-based mass crimes, whether ethnic, racist or religious, were identified in Rwanda, Srebrenica, the former Yugoslavia, and were brought to glaring light and their perpetrators hauled before international criminal courts. A panel of the US House of Representatives most recently adopted a non-binding resolution that recognised the genocide of Armenians by the Ottomans during World War I amid rebellion by Armenians to attain independence. The Democrats now want a full House resolution. Many other acts of genocide that were committed during the 20th century, including US atrocities in Vietnam and the Stalinist era purges, mass relocation of populations within the former Soviet Union and the death of political opponents in the gulags, remain un-investigated. That is not to mention the systematic extermination of American Indians in the 17th and 18th centuries. Genocide has become better defined and identified. Increased action has been taken to punish instigators. However, the world, both individually and collectively, has done little to explore and document the synergy between genocide and dictatorship, which is a very close and mutually reinforcing relationship. Dictatorship requires total control that overrules law, suppresses opposition, distorts issues, and misleads public opinion. It retains the tools of power for the trusted loyalist elite and evades accountability. This creates a perfect environment for repression, persecution and possible genocide. In the divided world of most of the 20th century, crimes of genocide were committed quietly, behind the closed doors of dictatorial regimes, with no international accountability. When they came to international attention, the outcry that human rights activists raised was lost in the labyrinth of foreign policy where state sovereignty and the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries covered up atrocities as domestic matters that precluded international jurisdiction. When in 1946 India raised the question of apartheid before the UN General Assembly because of discrimination against its coloured nationals in South Africa, the racist government in Pretoria dismissed the matter as a purely domestic issue over which the UN had no authority. Similarly, genocide was committed under the control of dictatorial regimes before the eyes of a baffled world. The Khmer Rouge regime massacred almost 1.7 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979 without any serious intervention by the so-called international community. Strangely enough, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia and toppled the Pol Pot regime, the UN Credentials Committee of the 1979 General Assembly session rejected the credentials of the new Cambodian permanent representative because he represented a government that came to power under the Vietnamese invasion. The representative of Pol Pot occupied the seat reserved for Cambodia that year. Some research institutions and NGOs concerned with the subject have put the number of the victims of genocide and democide -- those massacred by colonial regimes -- during the 20th century at approximately 260 million people. After the establishment of the United Nations, the end of the Cold War, the revolution in the technology and tools of communication and under the watchful eyes of mushrooming human rights groups, crimes of genocide became more difficult to conceal and more likely to be prosecuted. The International Criminal Court was established and its specially designated subsidiaries tried several cases of genocide. Sadly, the associated crime of dictatorship, which provides the environment for genocide, has not come under the same rigorous inspection. Like a chameleon, dictatorship has been adapting itself to its international habitat. It changes colour, tactics and builds a protective shield of alliances, making minor concessions where necessary to maintain its core interest of totalitarian power and perpetuity. With the exception of some crude examples like Myanmar, the 1970s military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and some other South American countries, modern-day dictatorship has donned business suits but maintains the same brutal mentality that tolerates no serious opposition. Its most lethal enemy is genuine multi-party democracy that entails a rotation of power. The Arab Middle East and its environs present a unique case of dictatorship. It consists of hard- core monarchies that do not feel apologetic and of feudal republics that feel entitled to retain at any cost the power they usurped. Regimes in the first category rule by the right of clannish ownership while the second category owns by virtue of power. While in the first category he who owns rules, in the second he who rules owns too. In both categories the peoples' right of choice is neither a critical factor nor a determinant that cannot be fixed. Wealth, whether oil-generated, laundered or skimmed, is central to the hold on power. But with hundreds of billions of dollars sitting in Western banks or frozen in real estate assets, why do autocratic rulers insist on retaining power by false legitimacy won through rigged elections at the expense of impoverished and helpless nations under siege by a police state system? One critical reason is, perhaps, that so many acts of corruption and so many horrendous crimes have been committed by them and their associates that they would be unsafe to allow a rotation of power lest another regime open those cans of worms. In 1979, Pakistan's prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was convicted of conspiring to kill a political opponent and was hanged. He had been deposed in 1977 by a military coup led by General Zia ul-Haq, who subsequently became the country's military dictator. So autocrats in the Arab region would only abdicate power if they could be assured it will pass into safe hands -- preferably to a close member of the family. In effect, this would be a difference in name only between republican regimes where power is supposed to be rotated by free elections and monarchies where inheritance is the name of the game. Regrettably, Western democracies led by the US have placed human rights and democratic rule on the back burner in order to advance their self-interest in the Middle East Arab region. It is mind-boggling that the US, which allied itself with every brutal dictator in South America in the 1950s through the 1980s, did not learn the plain lesson of how those countries eventually became an anti-American leftist- leaning coalition. Led by Venezuela, the region's oil-producing countries are forming a new oil cartel that does not promise to be friendly to the US. Autocracy in the Arab Middle East has become extremely sophisticated, deft and more oppressive, covering a fist of iron with a silk glove. Covert dictatorship is exercising police state powers under the guise of combating Muslim extremism. In the past, South American dictators perpetuated their atrocities under the guise, and with US blessings, of fighting communism. Oil and short-sighted strategic interests are leading the US into the same cataclysm now. The US is repeating the same mistakes it failed to learn from in South America, in Iran of the Shah, in Vietnam and in blood- drenched Iraq. Supporting dictatorial regimes and turning a blind eye to their atrocities is the worst guarantee of US interests. Brutal suppression, augmented by corruption and poverty, will lead to disastrous social upheaval that "all the king's horses and all the king's men" will not be able to control. In imperial Rome, a magistrate was selected and granted extraordinary powers for a limited period of time, usually not exceeding six months, in order to deal with a temporary state crisis. He was called a dictator, particularly in times of war or emergency. The powers the dictator was granted were never arbitrary, nor unaccountable; they were subject to the law and were reviewed in retrospect. The contemporary world of more complex international relations and extraterritorial interests requires a different paradigm. Democracy, respect for the international principles of human rights, and the rotation of power, along with accountability at the highest levels, should be jealously guarded standards. The conduct of foreign policy according to myopic interests is short-lived. Human rights and good governance standards should be institutionalised and enforced on a global scale in accordance with uncompromising code. A country that is perceived to be a violator of the legitimate rights of its own people should be cut off from the community of nations, politically, culturally and especially economically. Aid, loans, multilateral assistance and private investment should be linked to a transparent record of democratic rule and respect for human rights. The world needs to develop a non-governmental human rights rating agency, like Moodys or Standard and Poor's that rate the credit worthiness of countries and financial institutions. Member states of the United Nations should establish parallel commissions that review the state of human rights in individual countries and recommend to their respective governments and financial institutions human rights-based policies in doling out foreign aid, international assistance or investment, instead of the current narrow interest-based aid-giving policies. * The writer is a former correspondent for Al-Ahram in Washington, DC. He also served as director of UN Radio and Television in New York.
