Civilians from Hong Kong to Mexico, Ukraine to Burkina Faso, stood up to the establishment and demanded more accountability
Guardian Weekly, Tuesday 16 December 2014 08.53 ESTJump to comments (15)
2014 was a year when democratic values were fought for and sometimes lost. But the message remains that when people want change, politicians have to listen. Photograph: Alamy
It has been a year where the question of people power versus state hard power became ever more prominent. From Russia’s actions in Ukraine to Burkina Faso’s overthrow of a president whose rule had lasted 27 years, from Hong Kong’s upheavals to Mexico’s demonstrations, the story has been about civic aspirations and the reactions they foster. It has been about the battle for the minds, before the battle on the street. It has been about the extraordinary vindication of the role of new technologies in shaping debate, but also in handing repressive states ever more sophisticated tools to quell dissent.
As 2014 was a year of many commemorations, with the memory of 1914, of 1944 and the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, so was it a year where democratic values were fought for and sometimes lost. But the message remains that when people want change, it has become much harder for politicians to peddle the same old stuff. Civil societies are standing up to entrenched establishments and asking for accountability.
There will likely be more of this in 2015. In an era of ongoing wars, of fears of pandemics as well as of migrations, this is the good news. Václav Havel, the playwright and philosopher who headed the Velvet revolution in Prague in 1989, once coined a formula that still resonates: the “power of the powerless”. This power comes to the fore when citizens start making use of previously ignored margins of action, giving them a sense of entitlement.
It is neither romantic nor naive to suggest that people power is on the march globally. Protesters have come out on the streets, and camped in the squares. We saw such images in 2013 with popular uprisings in Brazil and Turkey. 2014 brought new stark illustrations, on all continents. In Ukraine, the Euromaidan movement showed spectacular resilience as it demanded an open, non-corrupt regime and rapprochement with the European Union. All through the winter of 2013-14, a packed crowd had relentlessly occupied the main square in Kiev. Mid-January, it was met with a violent crackdown by local security forces, who had been encouraged by the Kremlin to crush dissent. More than 70 people were killed. After that, many Ukrainians felt there would be no turning back. A European mediation effort led to a transition power-sharing agreement that was shattered when Viktor Yanukovych fled the country. Elections were planned. But Vladimir Putin had galvanised Russian nationalism during the Sochi Olympic Games, and he didn’t intend to yield. Moscow’s reaction was to foster separatist movements aimed at dismantling Ukraine or at least rendering it ungovernable.
This happened first in Crimea, then in the eastern region of the Donbass. So-called little green men, unmarked Russian troops and military intelligence agents, swamped these areas, in a strategy of hybrid warfare waged against a neighbouring country. Russia’s armed forces gathered at the border. The annexation of Crimea was the first redrawing of borders by force on the European continent since the second world war. There was talk of a new cold war. Europe and the United States adopted sanctions; the UN met to condemn Moscow. The conflict continues to this day, with a death toll reaching more than 4,300. But by the autumn the Ukrainians had brought to power a president and a government who promised to accomplish what had been denied by Yanukovych: reform, government accountability and close relations with the EU. Euromaidan made history, and demonstrated that, for all its faults, the European project can inspire and be a powerful beacon to new generations.
There was more marching, and occupying of streets, in Hong Kong. A peaceful, youthful, student movement came out in numbers to counter a plan by local authorities to reinterpret the rules set out for elections due in 2017. Protesters demanded a genuinely democratic process in choosing the next chief executive of the former British colony. They resented China going back on agreements negotiated before the handing over of Hong Kong in 1997 from British rule. Beijing, in response, attempted to frame the dissent as a western-led plot, much as Putin had tried to label the Ukrainian uprising. Police forces and thugs were sent in. As weeks passed, the Occupy Central movement pursued its civil resistance methods, aware that any chance of success depended on its peaceful character and on local solidarity networks.
Few observers doubted that the Chinese authorities would clear the protesters from Hong Kong’s streets if and when they chose. But despite arrests and efforts to intimidate, there was no repetition of the Tiananmen tragedy of June 1989. Instead, calls for dialogue went nowhere. In early December, the demonstrations ebbed and the leaders of Occupy Central called on the movement to stand down. The Hong Kong government may be congratulating itself for winning this battle without the need for more brutality. But that may be missing a key point, which is that democracy activists were voicing the complaints of thousands of ordinary Hong Kongers, who felt that their interests were being sacrificed by a ruling class obedient to Beijing. Occupy was a landmark event that will leave traces, not least on China’s image as it pursues its rise on the international stage.
Again people marched, or rather, dashed for government buildings, in the capital of Burkina Faso. The long-ruling president of this west African nation, Blaise Compaoré, had attempted to extend his term in office by changing the constitution. He was corrupt, and increasingly autocratic. Street demonstrations began. Compaoré tried to assuage popular demands by promising to resign in November 2015.
But it was too late – protesters wanted him out immediately. They stormed official buildings and pushed him from office. He fled the country. Large segments of society were demanding the benefits of genuine representation. Democracy could not be reduced to a facade while old authoritarian networks remained. It was a striking warning to other African autocrats who might be tempted to stay in power indefinitely. Burkina Faso’s speedy revolution sent out a clear signal. In eight other African countries, Benin, Burundi, Congo-Brazzaville, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Tanzania, presidents will reach the end of their term in the next three years. All of them seem to be toying with the idea of prolonging their term. Compaoré’s fall may lead them to reconsider.
In Mexico, people also came out by the thousands. The abduction, in late September, of 43 students in the south-western state of Guerrero led to nationwide protests against the nexus of narco-trafficking, violence and corruption that plagues the country. The leadership of Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico’s president, elected two years before, was severely tested, as some protesters called for his resignation. According to the government, the kidnapping of the students had been carried out by the municipal police of Iguala, and the police then handed the students over to a local drug gang, which murdered them and burned their remains in a municipal dump. But the families of the missing, along with many other Mexicans, rejected this narrative, crying out: “They were taken alive, we want them back alive!” Caravans of demonstrators converged on Mexico city in November. Peña Nieto offered proposals to reform the judiciary. But the popular outcry went far beyond that and reflected utter exasperation with a political system that tramples ordinary citizens’ rights while corrupt politicians and narcos thrive.
In many places, the rhythm of protests has been accelerated by technology. Pro-democracy and anti-corruption movements make intense use of social media and the internet to further their cause and raise awareness. Pictures and videos spread rapidly. Yet for all these new technologies, the thrust of the uprisings is one that has motivated people for generations – it is the urge to take a stand against abusive or failed governments.
People power has been met with hard power, but over time this comes with a cost for those who resort to the clampdown. Russia has virtually joined the ranks of pariah states by shredding the basic rules that have governed the European order since the end of the cold war, and even since the Helsinki accords of 1975.
Authoritarian states are certainly fighting back. Nowhere is this more tragic than in Syria, where the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship is taking advantage of the international community’s focus on combating Isis to pursue crimes against humanity on a massive scale. The civil war there has reached a death toll of more than 200,000.
There is an increasingly important battle over narrative, in which repressive regimes deploy propaganda to paper over their abuses and to lay the blame for all problems on outside forces supposedly conspiring against them. Disinformation is very much part of their strategy, and they have become more privy to using the internet as a tool to identify dissent and lock people up – a growing trend that the US thinktank Freedom House has exposed in a detailed report. The Edward Snowden revelations that triggered a healthy debate about online surveillance by big democratic states were seized upon by repressive regimes to widen their hunt for citizens who dissent. And, as happened after 9/11, the return of the “war on terror” to combat Isis has served as a convenient backdrop to further constrain political and civic freedoms. The Egyptian regime of Abdel Fatah al-Sisi is a case in point. This was not what the revolutionaries of the Arab spring of 2011 intended to produce.
But the fundamental values enshrined in the UN declaration of human rights of 1948 have preserved their strength despite all the talk about “cultural relativism,” whereby Chinese or North Koreans or Russians or Arabs are supposedly condemned to lower standards in the realm of individual rights. The “model” that China offers, one of mixing autocratic rule with elements of capitalism, is not what the protesting crowds have been calling out for. In Burkino Faso, when a revolt overthrew a dictator who had been long supported by the west, no one suggested the Chinese political and economic system could serve as a new road map for the country. What people want is a rules-based functioning democracy.
It is all the more striking that in Europe, where such values have formed the basis of states for decades, rising discontent has become a breeding ground for populist parties, such asMarine Le Pen’s Front National in France orGeert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. The EU project that was intended to cement democratic principles and prosperity on the continent has served as a punching bag for all those who fret against arrogant and incompetent elites. Immigrants are targeted as the supposed cause of social and economic problems, despite statistics showing they contribute to society and carry their share of the collective effort. The resilience of European democracies is put to the test as fears of the outside world and conspiracy theories abound. Politicians cynically exploit anxieties as economic growth remains generally weak.
But the disillusionment with old-style politics is not the full picture. Social media are flooded with comments that show there is a need for a new political conversation, more in tune with a grassroots approach. The populist movements’ slogans may only go so far – their programmes can be exposed for their complete lack of realism and their manipulative ploys. When Marine Le Pen wasforced to admit that her party had taken a €9m ($11m) loan from a Russian-controlled bank with links to the Putin regime, the connections between a large authoritarian power and populism in Europe became bluntly evident.
At once, everyone could see how a political party claiming to act on behalf of ordinary people was in fact being perfused by money from a corrupt system that had demonstrated its readiness to use force against those who step in its way. The fact this was revealed was in itself astoundingly good news. No more than China’s model, Putin’s methods are not those that are likely to appeal to the people power marchers of this world.
http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2014/dec/16/guardian-weekly-year-review-2014-people-v-state
