Democratically elected governments in Egypt, Ukraine and Thailand were challenged in the streets this year by losers with no respect for the ballot box and no patience for the democratic process.
A common thread in all three disputes was that well-heeled urban elites assumed as a matter, perhaps, of birthright that their ambitions had far more merit than those of their less educated, poorer and usually rural countrymen.
Western governments have not helped, either. After talking so much about the joys of democracy, western governments, and especially the United States, have either been silent or actively lined up against those who were fairly elected in Egypt, Ukraine and Thailand because their political philosophies were inconvenient.
Traffic loops smoothly around Cairo’s Tahrir Square today, after several years of almost constant upheaval. But it cannot mask the tense, superficial calm than now reigns on the Nile. Egypt continues to present a quandary for the West. Mohammed Morsi’s Islamist government drew most of its support from impoverished neighbourhoods and from rural areas. But it acted as if the 40 per cent of the country which had voted against the Islamists did not exist, aggressively ignoring democratic institutions and practices while promoting a religiously inspired agenda that the minority refused to accept.
Secular, middle-class Cairenes who protested for months against the Islamists in Tahrir Square, as they had once protested against Hosni Mubarak’s military regime, remain overjoyed that a bloody military coup last summer by younger generals rescued them from the Islamists after only one year and three days in power.
Ukraine faced a similar, although so far non-violent frisson, late this year. However, unlike in Egypt, where Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood has been branded a terrorist organization and its leaders have been jailed or are on the run, it is not yet obvious how the street protests in Kyiv will turn out.
Viktor Yanukovych’s government has massive backing from Russian-speaking eastern and southern parts of the country for the multibillion dollar economic bailout that he struck with Moscow. However, many in the West do not know this because protesters in Kyiv have received far more coverage of their desire to break with the Kremlin and establish formal bonds with the European Union.
This is a similar story to what transpired in Egypt earlier this year when the international media chose to mostly speak with those in Cairo who, thanks to their western educations and often tone perfect American or British English, sounded comfortably like their interlocutors. Such coverage ignored the much different voices who lived beyond the capital.
The hope of protesters in Kyiv is for fresh elections as there is a fair chance they might produce a new president such as Vitali Klitschko, the world champion boxer and Ukrainian nationalist, who wants the country to pivot west rather than north. However, there is almost no chance that another round of voting set for Feb. 2 will change anything in Thailand. Opposition parties there have declared they will not take part because the government of Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra will surely win again.
As happened in Cairo and is still happening in Kyiv, Bangkok’s elite have been out in the streets for weeks, trying to usurp the will of voters who live far from the capital. As occurred in Cairo before Morsi’s fall, and is occurring in Kyiv where Yanukovych’s government is under constant attack, there have been well-founded allegations of corruption in Bangkok against the Shinawatra regime as well as charges that find an echo in Egypt and Ukraine that she has solely been interested in promoting the interests of her own political base.
Although more than 300 Egyptian soldiers and more than 1,000 Morsi supporters have been killed since early last summer, it is too early to speak of a civil war in Egypt. But there have been ominous signs lately, especially in the Nile Delta and the Sinai. It is there that a Canadian general — Afghan and special forces veteran Denis Thompson — has just been named to the increasingly complicated task of heading the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) that monitors the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.
There has thankfully been nothing yet in Ukraine or Thailand to match the violence in Egypt. But at this point it is difficult to see how these enormous urban-rural ruptures can be peacefully repaired. There have already been rumblings in Kyiv about a war of secession pitting the capital and the Ukrainian-speaking west of the country against the Russian-speaking east and south.
The only certainty is that the perilous state of democracy in Egypt, Ukraine and Thailand — where none of the players care to understand that the concept involves a responsibility to be fair and inclusive — will attract global attention again in 2014.
Original Article
Source: canada.com/
Author: Matthew Fisher
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