Sri Lanka’s Democracy Deficit

A cartoon that did the rounds during and after the heady days of the Arab Spring, so-called, had Uncle Sam declaring, ‘Beware! We will give you democracy!’ It’s a bit like someone grabbing a fish out of water and saying ‘I want to save it from drowning!’ Much of the democracy angst we’ve seen over the past few days is like that. 

On Tuesday, November 13, 2018, the Supreme Court granted leave to proceed on the matter of several Fundamental Rights applications contesting the gazette notification issued by the President to dissolve parliament. What this means, in plain language, is that the court has determined that there is a legal matter that requires examination, nothing more, nothing less.

The politicians who went to court cheered what they called was ‘a triumph for democracy’.  Now, had the court determined otherwise, would they have lamented ‘a defeat for democracy,’ one must ask. Anyway, such triumphalism is par for the course. So too, the cheers of the faithful. 

What’s amusing is the angst and subsequent relief of those who claim to be apolitical or at least non-partisan. They include, but are not limited to spokespersons of certain Western diplomatic missions, self-labeled ‘civil society activists,’ certain academics and other professionals. They also include those outside of these circles, for examples, ‘ordinary citizens’ who hold candlelight vigils and posters claiming (perhaps to alleviate embarrassment) ‘this is not about Ranil’.  

Let’s nutshell it. We didn’t hear no whimpers about democracy, darlings, when Maithripala Sirisena appointed Ranil Wickremesinghe as Prime Minister on January 9, 2015 even though the man had less 25% support in Parliament. No whimpers when in April 2015, the Yahapalanists tabled a constitutional amendment drafted by a rank incompetent, Jayampathy Wickramaratne, that had more holes than swiss cheese. The UNP either didn’t see the holes or believed that the hole-guard, Maithripala Sirisena would a) not allow the opposition (the Rajapaksas, as they put it) to creep through it and indeed wouldn’t himself take a crawl. That the Mahinda-Faction of the SLFP voted for it is another matter here. The point is, there were no concerns raised then.

No whimpers when the President and Prime Minister worked to dissolve Parliament the very day the COPE report on the bond scam was to be made public. No whimpers when the democracy-champions used their respective national lists to accommodate persons rejected at the polls by the people. No whimpers when Sarath Fonseka was made an MP and given a ministerial portfolio.  

No whimpers, either in January 2015 or in August the same year when MPs crossed over to the government. But today, ladies and gentlemen, there’s  horror at the possible subversion of democracy. There are whimpers today. And therefore there are hurrahs at what is not an unexpected court ruling considering the fact that the architects of the 19th Amendment were incompetent and slothful. 

To elaborate, the Supreme Court pointed out points in Wickramaratne’s draft that were in violation of the constitution. The dissolution clause, court determined, required a two-thirds majority plus a referendum. Wickremeratne amended it, inserting a clause which allowed an interpretation permitting the President to dissolve at will, clearly at odds with the four and a half year moratorium on dissolution in a different clause. 

Back to whimpers. No whimpers when the Yahapalana Government kept postponing local government elections. No whimpers that the terms of six provincial councils have expired and there are no signs of elections being held.  

Not about Ranil? No, it is about Ranil for it’s Ranil that is the UNP and it is Ranil who was caught by the short-hairs by the President. If one were to be generous, one could say, ‘alright, it’s not about Ranil but it is certainly about the UNP and its political fortunes.’

The constitutional crisis should be talked of as a problem of careless wording. It is also about the machinations of politicians belonging to all parties, not just the UNP. However, the root of the crisis is about true representation. In other words the issue of legitimacy.

Sirisena mentioned a few months ago that there had been some 400 demonstration in Colombo since January 2015.. The official Leader of the Opposition votes with the yahapalanists on a consistent basis. What he and the heenen-bayavunu prajaathanthravaadeen (democrats who seem to have woken up from a bad dream) have not mentioned is the glaring representational anomaly. 

The opposition (which is of course not coterminous with the SLPP or the Joint Opposition) does not have proper parliamentary representation. Voter sentiment as expressed in parliamentary composition was mangled in January 2015 and this was repeated in August 2015. The results of the local government election in February 2018 is the most reliable indication of where the people stand. The Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna secured power in 239 local government bodies whereas the UNP got just 41 and the SLFP/UPFA led by Maithripala a humbling 10.  If democracy is about people, then they have spoken. 

Unfortunately, there was a clause in the 19th that made it difficult to act so as to correct this anomaly, i.e. through the dissolution of Parliament. It took a parting of political ways for Sirisena to move on this and we know how that process is stumbling along. What’s pertinent, however, is that simple arithmetic clearly shows that the anomaly has got worse after Sirisena decided to form a political alliance with Mahinda Rajapaksa.

The court knows best, and one should not presume here. Whatever the outcome of the litigation process, it seems sensible to proceed in a manner that resolves the representational conundrum for if left unresolved, the basic premises of sovereignty will be compromised. 

Those who champion the cause of democracy cannot ignore the democracy-deficit in parliament. They cannot therefore hesitate on the need for correction. There’s no better corrective mechanism than elections. There’s no better test of approval available in a democracy. You can’t want democracy and not have elections; no elections, no democracy.  The bottom line, then, is a single word: ELECTIONS.  

READ ALSO:

Who the &^%$ is Maithripala Sirisena

Hypocrisy in the name of democracy

From DS to RW: The Decline of the United National Party

Selective tear-shedding in seasons of demagoguery

Malinda Seneviratne is a political analyst and freelance writer. malindasenevi@gmail.com. www.malindawords.blogspot.com

Read more

Hypocrisy in the name of Democracy

‘I’M NOT HERE FOR RANIL, I’M HERE FOR DEMOCRACY AND GOOD GOVERNANCE.’ This was a poster or rather sentiments that appeared to be popular at the demonstration in Kollupitiya last week following President Maithripala Sirisena’s decision to sack Ranil Wickremesinghe and appoint Mahinda Rajapaksa as Prime Minister. 

Really? Really, really????

One of the better definitions of democracy is that it refers to ‘a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.’ And yet, this definition does not speak to the political economy in which the democratic process unfolds. For example, we know that people have to vote only for those who actually contest, and candidacy is not a squeaky clean matter. Only a certain kind of person can contest or rather only a certain kind of person has a good chance of winning. There are exceptions, but this is the rule.  

Different countries have different systems where representation is obtained. The United States of America, for example, selects rather than elects her Presidents. There are other realities which rebel against the fundamental tenets of a sound democratic process best exemplified by the outright robbery that took place in the 2000 US Presidential Election. Malcolm X saw this early. Well, it was not a secret as far as African Americans and other non-white peoples in that country were concerned. Malcolm X didn’t mince his words: ‘This is American democracy and those of you who are familiar with it know that in American democracy is hypocrisy.’

More caustic was the following observation which factored in the reality of an uneven, unequal and unjust polity: ‘democracy is an exercise in which the majority of people choose the sauce with which they are to be eaten.’

Nevertheless, ’democracy’ is the word in the streets. To put it more accurately, ‘democracy is the word in the Opposition Street.’ Democracy does not begin when parliament is dissolved and does not end when results are announced. However, since it’s representation through elections that’s being talked of it is good to think about how democracy has been played (and ignored) over the years.

When the first post-Independence elections were held, the Father of the Nation, so-called, stood at the ballot box with a club in hand ‘to protect democracy’.  Intimidation, tampering with ballot-boxes and such became part of the story thereafter. And yet on that occasion and thereafter whenever democracy came under threat or was subverted, the beneficiaries and their loyalists were quiet for the most part. Many have to say ‘sorry’. Indeed it would be possible to come up with a list of the ‘sorrowful’ IF remorse was part of their civic make-up.

Here’s a list, incomplete of course, but let’s call it a collective apology without thinking too much about whether or not the apologetic are still around. [Note: for reasons of space, we will not detail abuse that’s common such as intimidation of voters, violence against opponents, misuse of state resources etc., and we shall leave out the 'squeaky clean' gurus of Democracy and Decency in the International Community who are no different from the kinds of people mentioned below. We will not talk of those for whom extrajudicial killing of thousands upon thousands in the eighties was ok. We will not talk of those for whom similar excesses in the North and East during the war against terrorism was ok. We won’t talk of those who uttered not a word when the LTTE blew up buses, trains and carried out suicide attacks on civilians].

‘Those of us who knew of D.S. Senanayake’s strange notions of democracy and were silent…

‘Those of us who were silent when Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike abused parliamentary numbers and constitutional provisions in 1975 to extend the life of Parliament by two years...

‘Those of us who were silent, on account of political loyalty, when J.R. Jayewardene and the United National Party promulgated the Second Republican Constitution in 1978 which is widely recognized as being responsible for much of the democratic deficits on account of which there’s been much suffering.... 

'Those of us who were silence, on account of political loyalty, over the skullduggery and horrendous violation of basic democratic principles in the Referendum and Presidential Election of 1982...

‘Those of us who were silent, on account of political loyalty, when the Constitution was amended no less than 16 times during the J.R. Jayewardena years, mostly for partisan reasons, including the 13th Amendment that gave credence to Eelamist myth-modeling among other tragedies… 

‘Those of us who were silent, on account of political loyalty, when the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) warned that the first person who dared vote at each polling station in the various elections held in 1988 and 1989 would be shot dead and did in fact shoot hundreds…

‘Those of us who were silent, on account of political loyalty, when the Chandrika Kumaratunga regime orchestrated a move to get Chief Justice Sarath N Silva to facilitate crossovers in Parliament… 

‘Those of us who were silent when a group of Parliamentarians crossed over to the UNP in 2001, thereby tilting numbers against the elected government…

‘Those of us who were silent, on account of political loyalty, regarding the flaws of the well-intentioned 17th Amendment in 2001…

‘Those of us who were silent, on account of political loyalty, when the United National Front (UNF) Government of Ranil Wickremesinghe, with the support of President Kumaratunga, bypassed Parliament and the people to sign an agreement with the LTTE in February 2001…

‘Those of us who were silent, on account of political loyalty, President Kumaratunga took over three key ministries and thereby scuttled the UNF Government in 2003…

‘Those of us who were silent, on account of political loyalty, when Mahinda Rajapaksa introduced and got Parliament to pass the patently anti-democracy 18th Amendment in September 2010…

‘Those of us who were silent, on account of political loyalty, in all party elections under constitutions that favored the particular leader, especially that of the United National Party…

‘Those of us who were silent Those of us who were silent, on account of political loyalty, when President Sirisena appointed Ranil Wickremesinghe as Prime Minister in January 2015 when, at that time, he commanded a parliamentary strength of only a little over 40…

‘Those of us who were silent, on account of political loyalty, when parliamentarians of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) expressed support to the Yahapalana Government, again in January 2015…

‘Those of us who were silent, on account of political loyalty, when the Yahapalana Government Sirisena and Wickremesinghe in April 2015 promulgated the horrendously flawed 19th Amendment and especially the deliberately vaguely-worded term ‘National Government’ which is at the heart of the current political and constitutional imbroglio… 

‘Those of us who were silent, on account of political loyalty, when the Yahapalana Government dissolved Parliament in June 2015 to stop the damning COPE report on the Central Bank bond scam was to be presented to Parliament…

‘Those of us who were silent, on account of political loyalty, when President Sirisena arbitrarily sacked the Secretaries of the SLFP and the United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA), appointed loyalists in their place and effectively crucified the relevant Central Committees through a court order days before the General Election in 2015…

‘Those of us who were silent, on account of political loyalty, when President Sirisena arbitrarily sacked Ranil Wickremesinghe and appointed Mahinda Rajapaksa as Prime Minister on October 26, 2018…

‘Those of us who were silent when Ranil Wickremesinghe (on behalf of the UNP) and Maithripala Sirisena (on behalf of the SLFP) postponed local government elections and provincial council elections…

‘All of us, without exception, individually and collectively, are sorry. Sorry, democracy, we have abused your name, we have ranted and raved about you being violated only when we found ourselves at the receiving end of villainy and were silent and indeed not averse to cheering when such violence benefited the camps we belonged to or supported.’ 

Perhaps every single citizen who has voiced objections in the name of democracy and good governance selectively, can converge on Galle Face Green one of these days, each carrying a placard with the following legend: ‘I ONLY SAY “I’M HERE FOR DEMOCRACY AND GOOD GOVERNANCE, BUT I AM REALLY HERE FOR <add name of preferred politician or political party>’.  

Bottom line, if you are serious about democracy, you just cannot be a hypocrite, you cannot be selective. It just sounds stupid. 

Read more

The reason of protest



Media rights organizations demonstrating in Colombo.  Pic by Rukshan Abeywansha


Pensioners took to the streets early this week.  Media organizations protested too.  On Saturday, a dozen or so dog lovers stood at Lipton Circus pointing out that the city can be beautified without ‘white-vanning’ dogs.  University academics are up in arms.  Teachers complain of grievances.  University students boycott lectures as though their lives depend on it.  The non-academic staff of the universities have shown up in Colombo in considerable numbers to register objection.  Doctors threaten to strike. Nurses often do.  Political parties are always on the lookout for a cause to take up.

Now there are those who would add all these agitations up and say Sri Lanka is on the verge of an Arab-Spring equivalent; never mind the fact that the season of agitation in that part of the world was carefully scripted by those who really don’t give a damn about democracy, freedom and what-not and would not shed a tear for the victims of inevitable violence nor suffer any pangs on account of the anarchy they provoke.  But protests are a part of democracy and are a part of our political culture.  Some yield results, some don’t.  Some make headlines, some are ignored.  They don’t necessarily snowball into mass agitation and people’s movement for political change. They could, though. 

Protests indicate displeasure.  Moreover they indicate that establish means of getting grievances addressed have not worked.  Therefore, even though protests are prone to political hijacking, they are useful political moments for regimes or particular institutions to reassess policy.  Typically, the agitated are concerned only about the problems they face and when they table demands they are not concerned about other problems that redressing might engender. They can say ‘not our problem’ and wash their hands off.  Governments can’t do that.  They have to keep the large picture in mind.  They have to come up with comprehensive solutions, insist on the principle of give-and-take, work with the aggrieved by appealing to their better senses.

The biggest problem, then, is the ad hoc nature of policy and the inability to back decision with effective communication.  As of now, the generous view would be that the government has a comprehensive plan, only it has failed to communicate it to all stakeholders.  What is apparent however is that ad-hoc is the name of the game.  The pernicious designs on agent provocateurs cannot be the one and only ‘out’ when it comes to dismissing agitation.  The Government must do better than that. 

The eighties were like this, one may recall.  All kinds of agitation, all kinds of excuses for non-addressing of grievance, a clear movement in policy choice from ignoring to insult to baton-charge to harassment of protest leaders to outright slaughter describes the unfolding of that decade.  In this instance, the dismal track record of the regime-haters, especially their complicity in the machinations of both the LTTE and anti Sri Lankan actors in the international arena, have prevented people from rallying round them but this is not a cheque the Government can cash any number of times.

The Government would do well to look at all the faces arrayed against it and recognize among them many decent individuals who actually supported the Government in its policy choices regarding the LTTE and even with respect to its principal detractors, the UNP.  They might not shift political loyalties, but they probably will withdraw support if they haven’t already.  It is one thing to side with the Government against the LTTE and quite another to stand with the regime when key personalities with inflated egos and diminished common sense act against the national interest which includes the general wellbeing of the people. 

In all these encounters two factors are critical: reason and strength.  No one believes he/she is unreasonable, but everyone knows something about strength, one’s one and that of the ‘enemy’.  When there is lack, support is solicited and not always from the most decent quarters.  The protestor may be weak compared to a government, but he/she can find stronger allies overseas, even at the risk of compromising national sovereignty.  Politics, simply put, is not a nice game.  But in this game of winners and losers and victories squandered by arrogance and ignorance, the following advice from a Mexican revolutionary and poet might be useful to all parties:

“If you cannot have both reason and strength, always choose reason, and leave strength to the enemy. In many battles, it is force that makes it possible to win a victory, but the struggle as a whole can only be won by reason. The strong man will never be able to draw reason from his strength, whereas we can always draw strength from our reason.”

There’s a future at stake.  A nation’s future.  May everyone defer to reason over emotion, and may that be the source of strength for all parties!

['The Nation' Editorial, July 15, 2012]

Read more

There’s more to cat-skinning that meets the eye

 A couple of weeks ago, I addressed a gathering at a book launch. Rajpal Abeynayake, who was present, wrote in his column last week, that I should be ‘a little bit more circumspect’ in saying that ‘post-war power-sharing projects in countries such as Sri Lanka are driven at least partially by the purpose of foreign interests seeking to commandeer, or at least pilfer, our resources’.  I didn’t use those words.  I make a distinction between power-sharing and devolution.  More on that presently.  As for ‘circumspection’, it is embedded in the qualifiers interjected, even in his representation of what I said.  Yes, there are many ways to skin the cat, and as he puts it, polarization of people to the point of conflict and armed confrontation is but one of these.  The choice of strategy is of course informed by ground realities.  If conflict can be fuelled and if fuelling conflict works, then why not try it?  If it can be done in smoother ways (I recall the US-friendly J.R.Jayewardene shamelessly say ‘Let the robber barons come!’ when he opened the economy and the nation to untrammeled value extraction), all the better.  For those who are in this to make bucks, that is. 

Conflicts cost, Rajpal is right.  Countries have to pocket out bucks for weapons and other hardware.  That’s one way of making bucks.  It doesn’t involve ‘digging, exploration, denuding of forests etc.’ as Rajpal points out.  Avoiding conflict therefore, he argues, makes sense.  And as Rajpal says ‘It’s a good reason to want to think about such things, when rejecting internal power-sharing arrangements out of hand’.  Rejecting out-of-hand anything is not intelligent.  Things should be embraced or rejected after considering the pluses and minuses.  Power sharing, as far as I am concerned (and as I have argued) is a good thing. On the other hand, there are many ways to skin the power cat too, so to speak.  In a political arrangement where power is overwhelmingly concentrated in the office of the President, clipping wings makes sense.  It can only add value to citizenship.  I am all for it.  In Sri Lanka, however, ‘power sharing’ has been erroneously made coterminous with devolution.  Now the argument can be made that devolutionary power-sharing should not be rejected out of hand, taking into consideration the kinds of theft Rajpal has elaborated on.  True, as I said, out-of-hand rejection is bad; rejection or acceptance must be backed by logic, backed by facts. 

There is nothing to say that refusal to devolve would re-invent conflict in ways that facilitated value-extraction.  Secondly, there is nothing to say that devolution will not create conditions for renewal of conflict via upping of demand.  We can’t dismiss the Chelvanayakam thesis (which I’ve referred to often enough) of ‘little now, more later’.  Devolution to the current provincial boundaries will most certainly fix the Eelam map and knowing well that Eelamists are great liars and are damn good at turning myth and fantasy into fact via propaganda, it would be silly to assume that they’ll close shop with devolution, 13 or 13 plus.  More importantly, devolutionary power-sharing should correspond to grievance, i.e. in their true dimensions and not those inspired by chauvinism-inflated fairy tales.   Not only does the demographic data rebel against devolutionary ‘resolutions’, there is nothing to say that other ‘grievances’ can only be resolved through devolution.  Also, the I-can’t-decide-my-future type of complaints are not the preserve of any single community, but cut across ethnicities.  Devolution of power fails the economic test too.  Most of the wealth in the country is created in the Western Province. Even if there was no one engaged in land-digging and sweat-robbing, wealth creators cannot be expected to dole out bucks after being told ‘you look after your province, we’ll look after ours’. 

Not too long ago, we were told that if we devolved, then terrorism would disappear.  That was tried.  Failed.  We were told, ‘you didn’t devolve enough’.  Rubbish.  Those who want to mess things up, take up arms, explode bombs etc., are not persuaded to desist by reason.  The best we can do is to be honest about realities and take it from there.  And this includes calling the Eelamist bluff, which, given reduced circumstances, has been watered down to the articulation of the Chelvanayakam Thesis referred to above.  

If self-determination and democracy is what it’s all about, then the focus should be on changing the structures that perpetuate the devaluation of the citizen.  There’s a lot of ‘polarization’ around and it’s not being talked about because the exaggerations of the Eelam Lobby have made it easy for their neglect.  Devolution is nothing more than a pandering to Eelam myth-making, unless we go for a wholesale re-demarcating of provincial boundaries to correct regional resource anomalies and complement such an exercise with significant constitutional amendments that win back self-determination for the ordinary citizen.  Repeating somberly ‘conflict will come, conflict will come’ amounts to surrendering to falsehood and buttressing the land-theft designs of Eelamists. 

In the end it is the wellbeing of the entire population that should matter.  In this, whether it is Dole or KVC that’s ripping off people does not matter.   It’s the ripping off that is relevant, not the ripper-off.  There is no point in bragging about securing the territorial integrity of the nation if things associated with the term ‘nation’, especially resources, get pilfered left and right within the ‘saved’ boundaries.  And it matters little if the thief is a foreigner or a local. A nation is no one’s private property.   I think there’s a lot of work to be done.  I think we can do without distractions. 

Courtesy: Sunday Lakbima News - 4 September, 2011

Read more

Got tyrant-preferences, people?

Perhaps it is some intrinsic political tendency, genetic if you like, of the human condition, but we consistently interpret events in ways that justify our preferences or buttress our beliefs.  I am thinking of course about the recent developments (perhaps ‘development’ is too positive a term?) in Libya. 

This is supposed to be the tail-end of the so-called Arab Spring.  Those who coined the term (sections of the media that is slavishly pro-Washington) and those who orchestrated the whole operation (and let’s not kid ourselves that it was spontaneous citizens’ uprisings and nothing else!) quite happily conflate categories, use universalistic language and treat not just countries but entire continents as geographical and social monoliths.  We’ve seen crass generalizations regarding the countries and the uprisings.   

First of all, each country is unique and is uniquely constituted by class structures and other social layers.  They have different histories and have different structures of governance.  The people enjoy or suffer different benefits and deprivations respectively and live under different kinds of systems.  There are similarities, yes, but the distinctions override. 

The Washington-loving media speak of Egypt and Libya in the same breath. That’s not just shoddy journalism but indicate appalling levels of submission to the Washington View of the Word (WVW).  The disparities, corruption, dictatorial realities and assets of the two countries are starkly different.   Different too is the methodologies used by Washington to down regimes.  In Egypt a relatively more popular uprising was managed in ways that a regime was installed that could do what Mubarak had done for years.  So it was a matter of an unpopular but friendly tyrant whose use-by date had passed being nudged out and replaced by a regime that was as friendly to the USA. 

In Libya the USA and others of the Evil Axis, namely Britain and France, wrangled a UN Security Council Resolution to justify what was made out to be limited military operations ‘to prevent civilians being harmed’.  The ‘civilians’ turned out to be nothing more than a bunch of brigands funded and armed by Washington.   The Air Force of the USA and those of Britain and France have carried out over 7,000 bombing attacks since March 19, 2011.  They’ve sent special operation ground forces and commando units to direct the military operations of the so-called ‘rebels’.  It is, as Brian Becker, National Coordinator of ANSWER Coalition (‘The truth about the situation in Libya’) puts it, ‘a NATO-led army in the field’.

Dissatisfaction with the Libyan leadership is no doubt a part of the story, but impoverishment was not.  Libya, post-1969 not only cleared the nation of all foreign military presence, but put in place processes that resulted in a remarkable improvement in living standards.  The most pertinent fact is that Libyans are certainly not in charge of script-writing the rebellion nor will they be masters of the outcome.  It’s now months since anyone spoke of the Security Council resolution regarding the use and abuse of Libyan air space.  The protectors quickly became predators, perpetrating the crimes they set out to prevent. 

It’s all about oil.  Just as Iraq was and is about oil; Alan Greenspan who served as chairman of the US Federal Reserve for almost two decades, has confessed in his biography: 'I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.'  US-UK forces killed 1.2 million Iraqis for this, according to a report by the British polling agency, ORB.  So when Barack Obama goes ga-ga about Muammar Gaddafi taking pot shots at civilians, I can't but help think of kettles. 

Libya has the largest oil reserves in all of Africa and moreover her oil is particularly coveted due to its superior quality.   As Becker points out, if it was about democracy and civilization, then NATO had better start bombing Saudi Arabia right away. In fact NATO should have launched an attack against that country decades ago!

But Saudi Arabia will not be made a Libya.  Ronald Reagan insisted that the despotic, tyrannical monarchy will be protected against insurrection.  Barack Obama, for all his liberalist and outwardly enlightened rhetoric is proving to be a not-so-closeted Reaganite.  The same goes for Bahrain, where the regime has unleashed and continues to unleash violence on an agitating population that makes Gaddafi’s operations against ‘rebels’ in Libya seems like a water-pistol fight between schoolboy gangs.  But Bahrain will not be censured.  The people will not be armed. NATO will not drop arms nor send commandos to direct field operations. 

The reason is not hard to fathom. It’s about who is ‘My Kind of Tyrant’ and who is not, as far as Washington is concerned.   There are tyrannies, ladies and gentlemen, that will be suffered and celebrated and there are democracies that will be censured.  It’s about friendship. 

Did I hear someone mutter ‘integrity’ in a questioning tone?  No, that cannot be and anyway it can’t be about Barack Obama or the liars and brutes in NATO who are on his friends’ list.    It’s all very simple.  Libya is not Egypt II or Tunisia II, this we know.  Neither Bahrain nor Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, will be permitted to be Libya II.

Labouring the point seems meaningless.  There are other things to be done and I don’t have to elaborate. 

Read more