Democratic Conversation

The replay of Blair and Mushararf’s—and then Blair and Karzai—cozying up for, first, show, and second, substantive relations, shows minorly that leaders do try “change” as constructive means to alter history’s seeming glacial march toward cyclical mayhem. Yet talks and talking gets nothing done for the people who are repressed in the countries they talk about. Thus the cycle turns like Earth’s rotation.

The most misused and bastardized term in the last few years has been “empowerment.” The meek, defenseless, and abjectly disenfranchised are the usual referents to word empowerment. Governments and non-government agencies, international organizations, aid groups, even local leaders—let’s call them mayors—all use the term with varying degrees of equanimity. But they don’t know what they mean, I suspect, because what they do to empower people is counterintuitive to how governing systems have always worked.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, to name two failing states, empowerment has not been as much placed in people’s hands as lodged in their desperate grasp. Yet are they empowered? And what, if some will answer “yes,” are they empowered to do? Legal, free elections, so say outside governments, have empowered people with voting rights (many say “duty”). The people vote, leaders of varying power levels are elected, and the country moves on. How is that empowerment if the country is failing, or in failure?

The Iraqi’s die daily from sectarian violence—civil war, although no one dares utter that phrase so as to disprove the empowerment veil thrown over the country, elected officials, and the people in the tea houses. Empowerment has come to those few Iraqi citizens that have aligned themselves with various religious leaders, and fractious militias vying for street turf, not unlike urban gangs seen in the West during its socially and fiscally broken decades of the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. Many Iraqis see themselves as having been better served and treated by Saddam Hussein. They say this not only because of all the violence and blood feud vendettas perpetrated on Iraqi streets today, but because they know that when the power-hungry imams finally do get ahold of the people, there will truly be blood baths and repression of people, enlightenment, progress, and sociability.

In Afghanistan, poppy fields are now the major cash crop that allows its people to survive a failed economy. This is empowerment, where the government has failed to establish a viable economic system. But who has performed this empowerment? The government cannot say they have empowered the poppy farmers, because then they would have to admit that they are a narco-state, whose solvency depends on selling drugs to the world for its own security. So, the empowerment must come from the drug lords, basically the same people who have controlled the country, in one fashion or another, since biblical times. Call them drug lords today, the Taliban yesterday, but essentially they are the same tribal leaders that have repressed the people into ignorance, poverty, and fear for a millennia of generations.

For people to have empowerment, to own the means to positively change their lives in a legal, just, and sustained manner, others must be disempowered. You do not empower people by letting them check a box on a piece of paper that “elects” governors who are corrupt or in consort with the same criminals before elections were called. You do not empower people by invading their country and then leaving them defenseless against civil warriors.

To truly empower people—besides institutional systems of law, courts, and re-education of basic human rights—the powerfully corrupt must be eliminated or held to criminal and civil laws. War lord politics in Afghanistan has been the only reason Hamid Karzai has otherwise escaped assassination. This is why the people are starving who do not have direct food aid from international sources. This is why poppy fields bristle in the sun for as far as the eye can see—the Afghan version of America’s “amber waves of grain.” This is why the Taliban is resurgent in the poorest regions of the country. Failed governments fail because they fail the people, not the opposite. And when the people are desperate, they look to someone, anyone, who can feed them, clothe them, and protect them.

When those leaders show their despotic natures in the crimson flow of people’s severed veins, the people overlook their leader’s errors. For the alternative is much worse. This, too, is the cycle of “civilized” life since before recorded history. Most lately, this system has given us Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, John F. Kennedy & Lyndon Johnson, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Ronald Reagan, Yasir Arafat, Ariel Sharon, George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Each of these “leaders” either perpetrated war, committed war crimes through their leadership, or participated in outright murder. Mostly, their own disempowerment came from more bullets, but some where finally deposed by their people in a more “democratic,” civilized manner. Do you think those people felt empowered when their leader fell? Undoubtedly.