LOSING YOUNG ALLIES IN THE WAR ON TERROR

Artículo de Jeffrey C. Goldfarb en en "The International Herald Tribune" del del 21-8-02

America vs. democracy?

NEW YORK An Asian human rights activist introduced herself to my class as a threat to national security. Her commitment to democratic values put her so at odds with two Southeast Asian governments that she had to travel clandestinely. .Yet as our seminar on democratic culture came to an end this month in Krakow, she, of all people, declared that "American democracy requires the repression of democracy in the rest of the world." .Worse still, she was expressing the consensus of the students. These young people, moved by values of human rights and democracy, have become convinced that the existence of these rights in America is predicated on their repression elsewhere. .Every January I travel to Cape Town to teach in a program on democracy and diversity. Every July I travel to Poland to teach in a parallel program. Advanced graduate students, professors, human rights activists and young public policy advisers are brought together by the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies of the New School University. .The program has its origins in the Democracy Seminar, a clandestine intellectual exchange between Budapest, Warsaw and New York in the 1980s organized by Adam Michnik and me. .What I observed in January in Africa and just a few weeks ago in Central Europe among young opinion leaders from around the world has been alarming. Anti-Americanism is not just a hysterical judgment popular on the political fringe. It has become a principle of some committed democrats. .In January we started with reflections on the Sept. 11 attacks. I was shocked by the class discussion. With the exception of one young professor from Nigeria, all the students were focused not on confronting Al Qaeda but on the American war on terrorism. It seemed that the participants could not imagine that the Americans were victims. They could only understand America's power and condemn its excesses. Whereas I understood the American operation in Afghanistan to be fundamentally a liberation, my South African co-teacher and our students understood it as superpower bullying. Whereas I wanted to understand the mind-set of those who would kill thousands of innocents, including one of my dearest friends, in a suicide bombing, they could see only the horrors of collateral damage of the war on terrorism. .In Krakow I waited until the end of the seminar to open discussion of Sept. 11 and its aftermath. Before Sept. 11, anti-Americanism in Europe was a mild affair and a key part of the love-hate relationship between the French and the Americans. After the September attacks and with the war on terrorism in full swing, it could not be more serious. One of the students explained why they must focus on the reaction to the attacks: The war on terrorism is being used as a cover by dictators around the world to justify crackdowns on democracy advocates. Suddenly the rights of Muslims in the Philippines and Indonesia, or of the democratic critics of the authoritarian "Asian way" in Singapore, Malaysia and Burma, are not important to the Bush administration. .Suddenly the strategic resources of Central Asian dictatorships are more important than the lives of human rights activists. Suddenly defense of the American way of life seems to be predicated upon a lack of concern for the democratic rights of people in less advantaged countries. .As a rule, American democracy does not depend on frustration of democratic prospects in the rest of the world. At times it has played crucial roles in supporting democratic activists, as in Poland. But it did sometimes let the struggle for democracy play a secondary role in its geopolitical calculations during the Cold War, and it is doing this again. .When I think about my students, it seems to me that the young Muslim from Indonesia, the Burmese dissident living in Thailand, the democrat returning to Burma, the feminists in Poland, Ukraine, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Indonesia are the keys to victory against dogmatism and its terrors. .Only they can present the alternatives to terrorism to their compatriots - that work cannot be done from afar. They are on the front lines of the anti-terrorist struggle. Any war that undermines their position - and they convincingly report that the war on terrorism is doing so - is self-defeating. I believe that my Asian activist student is wrong when she posits a necessary connection between American democracy and foreign dictatorships - and that she wants to be convinced that she is wrong.