London Evening Standard comment September 1st 2009  

Once the election results in Afghanistan are finally in, Western governments need to draw up new and detailed initiatives on how to deal with failed states. In the coming years, many other countries will begin that treacherous transition from dictatorship to democracy, and we need to find a way to try to avoid the violence of recent years that has dominated our TV screens.

In Iraq, Western governments had no detailed plans on how to deal with the country once Saddam Hussein had been overthrown. Six years later, Iraq is still racked with violence. Afghanistan was neglected after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. There was no urgency to build the strong institutions needed to modernise the country. The result is the conflict that is taking the lives of British soldiers today.

In the previous generation, too, the West neglected Pakistan after its role in expelling the Soviet Union from Afghanistan ended in 1989. Pakistan swung from appalling democracy to appalling dictatorship and is now branded as one of most dangerous countries in the world.

Over the next few years, Western democracies may be asked to mentor transitions in countries that could either go smoothly or erupt into global crises. They include Burma, which has been under military rule since 1962 and is made up of ethnic communities often at war with each other. Aung San Suu Kyi, its symbol of hope, has spent much of the past 20 years there under arrest. But what would happen if the generals were suddenly overthrown and full and open elections held?

As the relationship between Cuba and the US thaws, Castro’s regime will come under pressure to hold full elections. Cuban exiles will try to win back their country, possibly sparking off massive instability.

How will democratic South Korea and autocratic China carve up the spoils of North Korea when it dissolves, and how should its brutal institutions be democratised?

As of yet, there are no clear policies on these questions. What is now known, however, is that the holding of full sovereign elections while institutions such as the police and the judiciary are corrupt and weak and infrastructure underdeveloped is highly risky, often leading to violence between ethnic, tribal and religious communities. If this were not so, the type of government that democracy is meant to create would not have left so many Africans poorer and caught in cycles of disease and violence.  

There are formulas that have been proven to work, including those used in Europe, which just over half a century ago was itself an amalgam of warring and failed states. The Allies waited 10 years before returning sovereign power to Germany after the Second World War, and even now the international community retains control of Bosnia, whose ethnic civil war ended almost 15 years ago. 

In East Asia, Japan was under American control for seven years and since then the region as a whole has forged ahead economically under mainly authoritarian and not democratic governments. Taiwan and South Korea have shown the way globally on how to move from dictatorship to democracy without violence – but it has taken them decades and not years to get it right.

Some of the concepts may be hostile to conventional thinking. But if they are taken on board, the next time the West embarks on a democratic mission it will be armed with fresh ideas on how to avoid bloodshed that creates trauma and hatred that can last for generations.

Humphrey Hawksley is a BBC world affairs correspondent. His book Democracy Kills: What’s So Good About Having The Vote is published by Macmillan on Friday.   

Democracy Kills: What’s So Good About Having The Vote  has been endorsed by none other that Parag Khanna, author of the internationally best-selling Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order,  chosen for the New York Times Year in Ideas. Parag himself has been named as one  of Esquire’s 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century. This is what he says:-

A brilliant work.  Tersely written and bracing in argument, perhaps only a distinguished, veteran traveler-journalist like Humphrey Hawksley could have written such a book. Democracy Kills is not only a first-hand tour de force review of the last two decades of hotspots, but it also frames one of today’s great global debates with nuance and wit.”

With the wonders of BBC technology, it’s possible to watch Dancing with the Devil on the I-Player

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00mb190/Our_World_Dancing_with_the_Devil/

In 1935, the writer Graham Greene set off on a journey through Sierra Leone and Liberia. In his book Journey without Maps, Greene asked what were the Europeans doing there? What did the slogans about civilising the natives actually mean? Humphrey Hawksley has been there to retrace Graham Greene’s journey.

BBC News Channel  

Sat 22nd August 2009  – 0530 and 1430 bst

Sun 23rd  August 2009 – 0330, 1030, 1430 and 2330 bst

Less than a year after the end of the Second World War, the West began drawing up the sophisticated policy of containment that eventually defeated global communism. Eight years after September 11, there is not yet a similar concept in dealing with the threat from failed states – even though it is these societies that have been the driving force of American foreign policy and its current wars.

Read more in Yale Global http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=12686

In 1935, the writer Graham Greene set off on a journey through Sierra Leone and Liberia. In his book Journey without Maps, Greene asked what were the Europeans doing there? What did the slogans about civilising the natives actually mean? Humphrey Hawksley has been there to retrace Graham Greene’s journey.

Shortly after dark as the solitary stilted “devil dancer” walked back into the Liberian forest, we headed off, but soon found the road blocked and in the darkness it was difficult to see why.

My torch beam picked up piles of bananas on the side of the road. I call it a road, but it was more like a farm track.

I then saw sacks of rice, a huddle of people – maybe 20 or 30 – they were passengers from a blue flatbed truck that was skewed across the route, its front wheels trapped in a ditch.

I heard what I thought was a baby’s cry and ran forward only to find that four bleating goats were part of the truck’s cargo. They were strapped onto the side, hanging and wrapped in brown cotton sheeting.

“We’ll have to return to the village,” I muttered to my Liberian driver, Mickey.

“No, we’ll fix it,” he said. “The chief back in the village is happy because we gave him some dash. So the devil is happy. So soon we’ll go.”

Dash is an old word for gift that the writer Graham Greene handed out to village chiefs when he walked through Liberia in 1935. I was tracing his route to see how much had changed.

Spiritual power

Today, disease is still rampant, although the yellow fever of Greene’s day has been overtaken by Aids. Pot-bellied children run around villages that are controlled by paramount chiefs. Christian missionaries still run much of the health service.

That morning, I had stood outside a small, stone church – such as you would find in any English village – at the entrance to the United Methodist Mission in the town of Ganta.

It was far in the northern interior of Liberia, and in Greene’s day the inadequate map had simply marked the area as being inhabited by cannibal tribes.

Greene had stayed at this mission station as a guest of a Dr Harley who had built the church, set up a clinic and was an expert in the secret societies and spiritual ways of the devil that Mickey and I had just been discussing with the village chief.

One of Dr Harley’s successors was Sue Porter, a quietly spoken and thoughtful American missionary nurse, who explained that many Liberians felt they had one foot in the bush and one in the modern world. And it was the same with their belief in God.

“When you talk about spiritual power here, it’s about the power or an ability to do something whether it is good or bad,” she said as we sat in the shade of a tree in the mission school grounds.

“Our Western culture doesn’t allow us to see it as a dual-sided figure.”

“It’s our bush society,” said Victor, the Liberian mission hospital administrator.

“The secret societies are meant to make you a good citizen, so the devil reminds you that if you are bad you can be punished.”

Devil dance

Mickey and I had gone on to the village of Zorgorwee, where a “devil dancer” was to be performing at dusk.

The village chief, dressed in a bright yellow and brown robe, said he was too hungry to speak to me, until Mickey gave him some dash – a packet of biscuits from our car. Then the chief summoned a translator.

“My name is Jacob Kermon,” he said in a booming voice that carried above the sound of singing and drums heralding the arrival of the devil. “And Jesus Christ is my personal saviour.”

“Then, why are we here worshipping the devil?” I asked, slightly confused.

“When the devil comes out people feel good,” he said. “He brings happiness and reconciliation within the community.”

As the sun dropped and villagers lit fires, a stilted dancer walked in from the forest.

He stood six metres high. His face was covered with a black mask, his head rimmed with shells. He was dressed in orange pyjamas, his hands sealed within the cotton.

One by one the devil plucked us from the crowd.

I had to stretch up my hands to hold his, staring through wood smoke at the mask and on to a star-filled sky, as he twirled me round and round.

“In the Christian world,” wrote Greene, “we have grown accustomed to the idea of a spiritual war, of God and Satan.”

But, he added, in this supernatural world there was “neither good nor evil”, simply power, a concept that was beyond our “sympathetic comprehension.”

But it was not beyond that of Mickey, my driver.

He was a wiry, powerful, young man, expert in making things work when they should not.

He had already used soapy water to replace leaking brake fluid and found petrol hidden in mayonnaise jars in a town where we were told it had run out.

Now he stalked around the hapless flatbed truck, speaking softly to some people, raising his voice to others.

Tree branches went under the wheels. Men lined up to push. The driver waited for a cue, which was delayed while the bleating goats were unhooked from the side.

Then with a heave, the wheels spun and caught. The truck lurched, and to much cheering, it bounced back onto the road.

Mickey gave me a knowing look. “As the chief told us,” he said, “if you dance with the devil, the devil will be nice to you.”

A highly-intelligent young woman graduated from Cambridge and took a job with Goldman Sachs. Very quickly, she became disillusioned with the world of finance. She became interested in the developing world. She spent a year in Liberia.  She did post graduate studies at Harvard. She applied to work for the British government. At her own cost, she flew over for three separate interviews, after which she was accepted over some 4,000 other applicants.  She was told she would work on tax or treasury issues. She was keen to work in her area of interest and expertise. She e-mailed, telephoned and wrote asking for a meeting or at least a conversation. She received no reply — not even an acknowledgement. She is no longer working for the British government. She has opted to apply her talent elsewhere.

I am not sure what era these civil servants believe they are working in. But I suspect with their pensions secure and benchmarks of achievements low, they have no incentive to ensure that Britain’s government is staffed by the best and the brightest. Everything in this story could be acceptable and explained — accept the refusal to reply to the correspondence. That is one symptom of a failing institution.

On the issue of democracy and dictatorship, I would like to share part of an e-mail I received today from a missioniary working in a very remote part of Liberia. I won’t put a name or place, unless  told I may.   

“When I look at Liberia, I see the events of the 16 year civil war that began as an attempt to rectify years of inequity to the indigenous people but then turned into local tribal fighting and individual power struggles, then I see man’s freewill turned sour.” 

Liberia  has technically been a democracy since 1847. It is one of the poorest countries in the world with 15,000 UN troops in place to keep the peace.

Could we please move on from this immature notion that those who question democracy, favour oppression and dictatorship? 

I am worried by Dominic Lawson’s statement in The Sunday Times (July 12th 2009):- ‘Democracies may lack outward “harmony”, but they are able to accommodate internal political disagreements — and changes of government — without bloodshed.’

Lawson, I hope, is speaking about developed Western societies where institutions are strong. In others societies where institutions are weaker and values different, the overarching question being asked every day is how to move from dictatorship to greater freedom — without bloodshed. 

Most of us in the West have failed to answer this. It’s time we started.

I’m off to West Africa now to look at how the intervention by Britain and the United States into Sierra Leone and Liberia almost a decade ago has succeeded or failed — or more likely is on that long path that could take decades before the prosperity overrides the threat of war. We plan to re-trace the journey of Graham Greene who in 1935 with his cousin Barbara travelled through Sierra Leone to Liberia encountering 20-foot high stilted Devil dancers, ritual village dancing, military commanders accused of war crimes, drunken Paramount chiefs, boasting politicis and malarial missionaries.  Let’s see what we find.