Activists at democracy forum would rather debate than take pot shots
The French may have pulled a power play to make points against the United States at the high-profile diplomatic Community of Democracies meeting. Across town, at the World Forum on Democracy attended by more than 300 non-governmental activists, there was a sense that their meeting had proved to be more productive than expected.
Outgoing Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek sponsored the three-day ministerial meeting with the active support of U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
The parallel conference at the Reform Plaza was sponsored by Poland's Stefan Batory Foundation, which is headed by Aleksander Smolar since being established more than a decade ago by George Soros, and the Betty Bao Lord-led Freedom House of New York, which monitored the Cold War for decades and has now found new footing as a nurturer of democracies.
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan left the diplomatic enclave to address the activists, and said they and the "civil society" they represent are an integral part of progress in creating and sustaining new democracies even if "sometimes you do give us discomfort" because they can push governments to act despite the opposition of top politicians. This has been borne out in a new ban on land mines and a move to create an international criminal court that will "unlock that missing link" to end the bizarre situation "where a man could go to prison for life if he kills one person but could go free if he kills 10,000," Annan said.
Annan specifically praised Soros, who attended most of the sessions, saying: "George Soros wears many hats he's not just a businessman."
In his own speech, Soros warned that while there might be a "triumph of capitalism in the world," it is premature to "speak about the triumph of democracy."
Repressive regimes are shored up "from the formation of unholy alliances between government and business" in Peru, Zimbabwe and Malaysia, Soros said, just as fascist regimes were in the wartime in Italy, Germany and Portugal. In many successor states to the Soviet Union, democracy talk cloaks the reality that "gangster capitalism" has taken hold, where "the powers of the state are diverted to the benefit of private interests," Soros said.
New solutions are needed today if universal principles such as "freedom, democracy and the rule of law" are to be safeguarded, Soros argued. Global markets don't take care of individual needs and most international institutions are too tied to governments to do that, either.
He proposed an alliance between today's open societies which he defines as not just civil society but as also including democratic government and an independent private sector to promote the evolution of a global open society and to expand these principles within individual countries.
When the critiques came in, Soros' speech was a highlight. But it wasn't the only one.
In general, there was minimum haranguing, maximum listening and then fairly civil debate on points of contention such as how to deal with dictators or spies from the communist or totalitarian past, as well as how to curb the wave of corruption that has affected both new and established democracies.
Gazeta Wyborcza's founding editor and 1980s Solidarity activist Adam Michnik was his usual provocative self as a keynote speaker, elaborating on his mantra of "amnesty, yes; amnesia, no."
That drives many Solidarity right-of-center activists berserk. The global activists weren't all that pleased, either, at Michnik's application of the amnesty credo to former Chilean dictator Alfonsin Pinochet. Michnik backed Pinochet's return to Chile, which foiled attempts by Spain to hold him in the U.K. for a trial on war crimes. Former Argentinean President Raul Alfonsin said Pinochet was "a bloody murderer who should be punished" even if outside of Chile and that earlier efforts to do this in Chile "were hampered by the United States."
A Nigerian activist also disagreed with Michnik and asked him how to guarantee that justice is done, and not to "forget the atrocities of the past."
"There is no clear answer," Michnik said, adding that "Chile is a toddler democracy and I believe it has passed the mark with very high grades ... There have been free elections. And there is no reason why Chile should have a big brother in the form of Britain or Spain. Put yourself in their shoes would you be happy if Nigerian politicians were arrested at the airports in London or Washington and tried in their courts?"
"There is no guarantee of justice anywhere," Michnik said. "Do you think all is fair in the United States? I've never heard anyone say the O.J. Simpson trial was a fair trial." But "exhuming the past," he said, may "murder today's democracy."
Another highly rated panel was on corruption and was headed by Poland's former prime minister and former justice minister, Wlodzmierz Cimoszewicz, whose somewhat ad hoc "clean hands" campaign gave his Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) colleagues a nasty shock several years ago.
In the room were two Polish anti-corruption activists: Antoni Kaminski, chairman of the Polish chapter of Transparency International, and Grazyna Kopinska, project director of the Batory Foundation's new corruption monitoring unit.
The main fireworks came in an exchange between a Russian delegate commenting on remarks by Italian Senator Antonio Di Pietro, who launched anti-corruption crusades as a magistrate that changed the political landscape, and by former Ukrainian Justice Minister Serhiy Holovaty, who said he had failed to do likewise because of top-level political opposition.
The Russian said "Di Pietro did a great service in Italy and kept the Communist Party from reaching power there but the political system in Russia is too weak for this." He added that "because the capitalist system in itself is corrupt," arguing that corruption can be countered in transition countries "is only propaganda."
"I totally disagree with you," retorted Holovaty, now president of the Ukrainian Legal Foundation in Kiev. "I disagree that corruption is integral to the transition. That's not true. If you take Russia and Ukraine and compare them with Poland, you will see there is a great difference."
Holovaty said "state capture" payoff demands by state officials "is on a very high level in Ukraine and is very much less in Poland."
Di Pietro said that if "we understand capitalism as free competition of capital, it benefits democracy and is not a cause of corruption." He added that "corruption is not the daughter of capitalism" but of politically connected power brokers.
