Letters: Democracy and dictators
We may well be seeing the same level of change in the Middle East as happened in Europe at the fall of the Berlin Wall. But then we were on the side of the good guys, so we have a reasonably united and democratic Europe. They remembered our efforts to relieve the siege of West Berlin. But Gaza's?
In the Middle East, we are not on the side of right and freedom. We have supported the governments of Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Jordan, the sheikhs of the Gulf, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia against their people. We spout support for democracy now in Egypt and Tunisia – but in Algeria and Palestine?
After the way we have treated democrats in the region, do we really expect the people of the Middle East will believe our protestations? Why have we finished up on the side of the dictators?
Following the events in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere, your leading article (29 January) highlights how Western hypocrisy towards the Arab world stands exposed.
One cannot but note how Western meddling 20 years ago helped to prevent the emergence, in Algeria in January 1992, of what is generally agreed would have been a democratically elected Islamic government. Riots of the type seen in Tunisia and Egypt led, in Algeria in October 1988, to a reported 800 deaths of civilians from military gunfire. President Chadli promised a new constitution, which would inaugurate a multi-party state.
Elections followed and the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) won the first round in December 1991 and was poised to win a massive majority in the second round. It was at this point that the military, supported by France, the USA and the West, cancelled the second round.
The West was pre-occupied with the idea of another Iran in Algeria, but Algeria was not Iran. The result was descent into the bloody chaos of the decade that followed between Islamist armed groups and the security forces. More than 150,000 people were killed, many at the hands of Islamist groups, but tens of thousands were arrested and dreadfully tortured, and thousands disappeared, at the hands of the security forces. It is estimated that a million and a half people were displaced from their homes.
Allowing the FIS to form a government could hardly have led to a situation worse than this. Did the West miss an opportunity in 1992 to support some of the first democratic elections in the Arab world, and is it not now time to allow democracy to prevail, even if the West does not like the result?
Without a guiding organisation, the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston box" (Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution). It looks as if the events unfolding in Egypt are going to put Trotsky's metaphor to the test.
