Howard supplanted

Following the assassination of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, the country’s ‘ex-military’ president Pervez Musharraf has achieved a national opprobrium matched only by former Australian prime minister John Howard.

Former Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif has denounced Musharraf as the source of “all the problems confronting the nation.”

Strange, but I seem to recall it was Bhutto’s corruption-mired prime ministership that helped tip her country into the spiral of instability that culminated in the ascendancy of the military under Musharraf.

The slaying of Bhutto is, of course, to be unconditionally condemned. Quite arguably, however, Musharraf is a prominent symptom of a deeper malaise.

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Give a dictator an even break

In a recent column Greg Sheridan pleads, “If only Pervez were more like Suharto.”

Sometimes the word dictator can prevent clear thinking in the Western liberal mind, as often does the word war. But, as George Orwell observed, wars have results, and different wars have different results, depending who wins.

So it is with dictators. There are more and less ruthless, bloodthirsty, legitimate and effective dictators. The quality of the dictator influences profoundly the quality of the nation.

Ooh, Sheridan has my head spinning with all this ‘realist’ talk of mach politik... but I will persevere and take the plunge with him.

Sheridan denounces Musharraf as “a weak, ineffective and foolish dictator” because, for instance, he has failed to stem the rising tide of Islamist extremism in his country. Apparently such extremism in Indonesia is not an issue for Sheridan, forgetting that it’s almost certainly an issue for the victims of the Bali bombings and their families.

By contrast, Suharto was presumably a strong, effective and astute dictator, a veritable pin-up boy of dictatorhood by Sheridan’s lights.

Suharto was a dictator and there were many bad things about his rule, especially his human rights record. But here’s the complex bit: he built a modern Indonesia that was capable of sustaining democracy.

It may not occur to Sheridan, but it may be the case that Indonesian democracy survived despite Suharto, thanks to the aspirations and dedication of millions of his countrymen.

But okay, giving the much-maligned Suharto the benefit of the doubt, surely Sheridan doesn’t need it pointed out to him that Suharto had over two decades, not to mention thousands upon thousands of bloody corpses, head-start on Musharraf.

It’s early days yet, so Musharraf may yet earn his place in Sheridan’s pantheon of benevolent despots. Give a dictator an even break!

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Certainty affirmed

“I don’t know about my future but I am certainly the Foreign Minister.”

• Alexander Downer, Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs

Australians all will breathe a sigh of relief at this affirmation that Mr Downer is keeping his eye on the ball for Australia.

“We are only focusing on winning the election. That is all we are thinking about at this stage and that is a big job.”

Our taxes at work. But still, Mr Downer has his finger on the pulse of Australia’s national interest on the world stage; for instance, with regard to General/President Musharraf’s experiments with Pakistan’s democracy...

“Well, he’s certainly, by certain standards, well he’s certainly by some standards a dictator.”

Well, Mr Downer is certainly on the right track there, the right track, certainly. Of course, as with Soeharto, the unequivocal denunciations will come after the General has gone on his merry way.

According to Prime Minister John Howard, Soeharto’s Indonesia was “not a democracy in the sense we understand it.”

After the fall of Soeharto, of course, it suddenly became safe for the Howard Government to describe that particular strong man as “a dictator”.

In the case of Musharraf, the diplomatic niceties are nominally in the service of Australia’s national interest in the ‘war on terror’.

In Soeharto’s case, it was all about the war on communism... No wait, Domino Theory was pre-1990, so in the Howard Era it must have been about keeping our strong-but-unstable-neighbour-to-the-north on side, in a ‘constructive engagement’ that mutually benefited both Australian commerce and, in a round-about, trickle-down sort of way, the Indonesian people.

Well anyway, the certainty is that a pretext will always be found to selectively coddle ‘our’ preferred sons’a’bitches.

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Extremism abhorred

On Lateline last night, Pakistan’s religious affairs minister, Muhammad Ijaz-ul-Haq, was interviewed on the aggressive political clamp-down by the country’s military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf.

In a nutshell, Mr Ijaz-ul-Haq said there’s basically nothing to worry about. The suspension of the constitution and the judiciary, the mass arrests, the violent suppression of street demonstrations and all the rest of it are but a “very small phase that we have to go through.”

Fear not, for democracy and the rule of law will return “once [Musharraf] is an elected president of Pakistan.”

The actions of Musharraf’s government were necessary because “the entire law enforcing agencies were getting demoralised and the extremists were getting opportunities to, you know, exploit this demoralisation...”

Mr Ijaz-ul-Haq’s abhorrence of extremism should be well-known. When in June the UK government conferred a knighthood on Salman Rushdie, Mr Ijaz-ul-Haq was quoted as saying:

If someone commits suicide bombing to protect the honour of the Prophet Muhammad, his act is justified. This is an occasion for the [world’s] 1.5 billion Muslims to look at the seriousness of this decision. If Muslims do not unite, the situation will get worse and Salman Rushdie may get a seat in the British parliament.

Mr Ijaz-ul-Haq’s abhorrence of extremism is apparently surpassed only by his abhorrence of democratic processes leading to the wrong outcomes.

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