- Human RightsReports
- August 5, 2008
- 16 minutes read
Anatomy of power
After years of hiding in broad daylight, self-styled Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has been captured and will soon stand trial before The Hague International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Power has assumed new definitions and functions. It no longer encompasses the old, almost naïve ideal of “power of the people, by the people, for the people”; it is now power over people, with the pretense of serving them despite their will.
Absolute power is a necessary instrument to rule unopposed for an indeterminable period of time, to go to war or to commit genocide or ethnic cleansing in the name of the people. This was the case in Nazi Germany, the Stalinist Soviet Union, Ceausecu”s
Karadzic, like his deceased godfather Slobodan Milosevic, was not born a serial killer. He was, however, imbued with the crazed sense of Serbian nationalism that, a century ago, inspired a young Serb, Gavril Princip, to shoot and kill the Crown- prince of
During the Bosnian war and the mass slaughter of 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica in July 1995 Karadzic was astounded by Western reaction to the genocide. He could not comprehend how Western countries failed to understand that his armed militias were doing the civilised world a favour by holding back the hordes of Muslim savages, the Turks as he called them. According to a New York Times reporter, on the night of 12-13 July, when Bosnian Serb forces under the command of General Ratko Mladic, another commander wanted for charges of genocide, rounded up several hundred youths a soldier smilingly told his commanding officer after the victims were led into the woods and shot in the back of the head: “It was a good hunt tonight, sir. There were a lot of rabbits in the bush”.
Karadzic”s trajectory from megalomaniac dictator to war criminal was pursued according to the book. With support and military supplies from his mentor, Milosevic, he went about the ethnic cleansing of
That is what Hitler and his Nazi lieutenants did to the Jews in their “final solution” strategy during World War II, what leaders like Augusto Pinochet did to the opposition in Chile, staging a US planned military coup to save the country from the danger of communism, and what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians in the name of fighting terrorism. President George W Bush borrowed the same tactics to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, to intimidate Congress after 11 September into enacting Patriot Acts I and II which appalled human rights activists and organisations, and to scare the American people into re-electing him for a second term, painting himself as the only candidate capable of protecting them against a recurrence of 11 September. The humanitarian crisis in
The lust for power is endemic in the Arab Middle East. Monarchies are hereditary and almost absolute while republican regimes are fostering the tradition of monarchy, including experimenting with the hereditary rotation of power. There have been no free and fair elections in a pluralistic political environment in any Arab country for the past 50 years save for
The problem Arab power-holders face is that power politics are shifting and the maximum extent of their brutality, short of massacre, is not going to serve their ends. Decades of ruling by emergency laws and the ruthless practices that go with them have not cowed the opposition masses whose rebellion has been exacerbated by crushing poverty, poor education, negligible healthcare services, suppression of human rights, under- employment, the absence of genuine pluralism, fraudulent elections and the control of power by a single, unopposed dictator. It is George Orwell”s 1984 incarnate.
Arab despots have given up many of the attributes of historic dictators: no charisma, no cult of personality, no delusion of grandeur and no frantic adulation by the masses. But they have one thing in common: the drive for life-long power and reluctance to introduce an institutional successor.
A curious paradox is that at the time when some monarchies and emirates, particularly in the Gulf, are experimenting with participatory democracy at the legislative level, other old-time republican regimes are edging slowly, but determinedly, towards a form of feudal monarchy where pluralism and participatory democracy are the veneer but all real power rests with one person. The only genuine hope is that the resistance of the people is getting stiffer and the instruments of modern communication are empowering them to challenge the pretense of sham democracy.
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