No small triumph for democracy

AMID DISTURBING SIGNS that a decade of experimenting with democracy and political plurality may be ending and South America may be headed back to an era of soft dictatorships comes the triumph of people power in distant Peru. The announcement by that country's President, Mr. Albert Fujimori, that he is ordering elections in which he will not be a candidate is a rare victory for the Peruvians who had only two months ago failed to stop his return to power through clearly illegitimate actions. The decision must bring considerable relief to the rest of the Latin continent which has in the past year been witnessing democratic rule being nibbled away, raising fears of a return of the murderous juntas. From Argentina to Chile to Venezuela, the pressure on civilian Governments has been mounting from a combination of factors, threatening to unravel the peaceful revolution of the Nineties when the continent began the long and arduous journey back to political normality. Two decades of ruthless military dictatorships sponsored and supported by the United States during the Cold War era - by the mid-Seventies there was hardly any elected civilian leader in power - had given way to steady movement towards democracy. One by one the military regimes yielded place to civilian rule, egged on by a Washington whose ideological blinkers had by then fallen away.

Mr. Fujimori was among the first of these to get elected as the continent was swept by a democracy wave. In a region which had got disused to democracy, Mr. Fujimori soon began to assume dictatorial powers, riding roughshod over opposition forces. After two terms in office he was ready to subvert a Constitution that had barred a third term. Sacking judges who ruled that a third term of Presidency was unconstitutional, he went on to adopt suspect methods to win the election this summer, muzzling the press, sabotaging rival campaigns and denying equal opportunities to political opponents. When the U.S. rejected the election verdict as flawed, Mr. Fujimori won surprising support from the Organisation of American States where member-nations, long used to malevolent U.S. intervention in their internal affairs, refused to join the condemnation of the Peruvian electoral distortions. Washington kept up the pressure on Mr. Fujimori to step down and organise free and fair elections. This pressure and to some extent the continuing mass street protests in Lima must have been among the factors that forced Mr. Fujimori to renounce his candidacy and opt out of the race. The decision follows the release of a videotape purportedly showing a close aide offering bribes to an Opposition legislator to win support for the President who got re-elected for a third term but lost his majority in the nation's parliament.

Latin America, like South East Asia and in particular Indonesia, is learning that the path of true democracy never does run smooth. It is also learning that the perfectly legitimate action of attempting to bring former dictators to book can have traumatic consequences for the nation. Despite the continuing travails of former dictators such as Gen. Pinochet of Chile, in the dock under the relentless glare of the international community, it is not clear that the more relevant lessons are being learnt. If dictatorships and the attendant brutality of the regimes are no solution to people's problems, neither is an elected autocrat like Mr. Fujimori. For, the most serious threat to democratic experiments in many countries may arise not from classic military dictatorships any more but from more subtle forms of autocracy practised under the garb of civilian rule.

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Section  : Opinion
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