Durdana Najam
In an era of political jostling leaders are more interested to test limits then bringing the international order to serve humanity—its first order of business. For many, the only way to govern is knowing what they can get away with. Instruments of collective actions, such as the United Nations Security Council and those of collective accountability, such as the International Criminal Court are ignored and disparaged. The world has become more violent? But, what is new about it?
Without going farther back, the recent decades have plenty to offer on that account. Iraq’s chemical weapon use against Iran in 1980s; the 1990’s bloodletting in Bosnia, Rwanda and Somalia; the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the collapse of Libya and South Sudan—all these happened in the presence of a purportedly rule based and liberal international order. The constant in today’s violence and those happening in the past is the disregard to rules and order, as and when deemed fit, by those who had them made, at the first place. The erosion of political order looks different when looked from Beijing, Moscow and developed/ing world, then it does from Brussels, London and Washington.
The United States has never ratified the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights — a very Old World stance. The United States takes the credit of liberating Europe from fascism. However, two fascists, Francisco Franco from Spain and Antonio de Oliveira Salazar from Portuguese were US allies up until their death in the 1970s. Chile’s democratically elected president was replaced by a fascist dictatorship through a coup the CIA orchestrated. The once proud and wealthy country of Argentina was bankrupted and made miserable by a fascist regime supported by the US.
The wind has always been in the sails of strongmen worldwide. It is just that earlier violence was perpetrated wrapped in the cover of democracy and western cohesion. Today, it is done with banner of nationalism and authoritarianism held up, in a complete negation to human rights and dignity. The inward-looking populist leaders celebrate narrow social and political identity, vilify minorities and migrants, and assail rule of law and independence of press.
These leaders do not only indulge in blatant wars they also test norms. India has obstructed freedom of movement of Kashmiris after abrogating its autonomous status. Saudi Arabia has pushed the limits with the war in Yemen. Seven hundred thousand Rohangiya Muslims have been expelled from Myanmar. Israel feels emboldened to disregard two-state solution to solve the Palestinian crisis. In Budapest Victor Orban had shutdown Central European University and has enacted “slave law” that increases permissible overtime and allows for three-years delays in paying overtime. In the US, Donald Trump has separated children from their parent at the US-Mexico border, to enforce immigration laws. The captured immigrants are kept in dilapidating condition.
Such actions are not new but they are more brazen and overt. Among them the common feature is the assumption that there will be a few if no consequences for the breaches of international norms. The disdain for human rights has never been so pronounced. Democracy has become a transactional norm. The rich Middle Eastern countries, wearing the Muslim robes, decorated Modi just when the Bahartiya Janata Party was locking down Kashmir in curfew for an unending period. It is India’s market size that decides the behaviour of the international leaders. If Muslim as a minority are being killed, insulted and looked down upon. If Dalits and other low caste Hindus are getting flake from the high caste Hindus. If the Citizenship Amendment Bill is drawing new religious faultiness in India. It hardly matters, so far as India’s prospect to be a country of profit, consumerism and large customer base persists.
The oppression of the Kashmiris and general Muslims in India gets usual condemnation from the US whereas in the case of China the US passes two resolutions: One against human rights violation in Hong Kong and another over human rights abuse of Uighur Muslims in the Xinjiang region of Western China.
Another streak was added to this method of madness with the release of Lessons Learned interviews, generated by a federal project, examining the root cause of the longest armed conflict—the Afghan war. According to the document, secured by the Washington Post through a legal battle under the Freedom of Information Act, the US had gone into the war with no preparation or seriousness of effort. The document narrates:
“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.
Negating the towering claim of the US government of managing governance in Afghanistan the report pointed out:
“The interviews also highlight the U.S. government’s botched attempts to curtail runaway corruption, build a competent Afghan army and police force, and put a dent in Afghanistan’s thriving opium trade.”
John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.”
Despite these negative developments there has been a resistance to them as well. The abuses of authoritarian rules have been responded with powerful human rights protests. In Budapest crowd protested against polices of Oban. The CAB Act has caused unprecedented protests across the urban cities of India, demanding the withdrawal of indiscriminating clauses from the Act. Malaysian voters ousted their corrupt prime minister, Najib Razak, and the ruling coalition in power for almost six decades. Maldives voters rejected their autocratic president, Yameen Abdulla Gayoom. In Armenia, whose government was mired in corruption, Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan had to step down amid massive protests. Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis faced growing protests against his alleged corruption. Ethiopia, under popular pressure, replaced a long-abusive government with a new one led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. US voters in the midterm elections for the House of Representatives rebuked President Trump’s divisive and rights-averse policies and have now impeached him for soliciting Ukraine’s help in maligning his electoral rival Joe Biden using aid money as leverage.
At the multilateral level five Latin American governments have sought an International Criminal Court’s investigation on crimes in Venezuela.
If the list of geopolitical manoeuvring is long and exhaustive, the counter-back to them is equally robust.
While we leave 2019 the policy makers must reflect on what lies before them. All the issues discussed above have the potential to mutate into full-blown crisis. Unless the leadership holding the reign of international order adopts provocative and dynamic diplomacy, a judicious use of military force, the creative exercise of soft power and reinvent western leadership that respects international norms, multilateral organizations and embraces the importance of democracy, the decent into a medievalism cannot be prevented.
Note: The article is based on author Durdana Najam’s own research as well as inspired by a Foreign Policy magazine article 10 Conflicts to Watch in 2019 (http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/28/10-conflicts-to-watch-in-2019-yemen-syria-afghanistan-south-sudan-venezuela-ukraine-nigeria-cameroon-iran-israel-saudi-arabia-united-states-china-kurds-ypg/ )
