Freedom’s Excesses Reduce Democracy’s Life Span

Hlaleleni Phungula died as a deep autumn chill engulfed the undulating hills of Zululand. The young mother, just past her 18th birthday, was shot in the back as she fled her mud-brick and thatched hut into the night.

Six other women and three men were also gunned down when a Zulu political gang raided this rustic knoll-side hamlet. The final victim was Phungula’s 2-month-old baby, who smothered under the weight of her mother’s body.

“We found them the next morning near the stream,” whispered the baby’s grandmother Ilene, a tiny Zulu bundled in a blanket, as she waited to vote in the final phase of South Africa’s two-year transition to democracy--long-delayed elections in KwaZulu-Natal province, heartland of South Africa’s largest tribe.

“We never saw the killers, but we think they came from the next village,” she said. “I haven’t slept at home since Hlale died. I’m afraid they’ll go after me next.”

The extension of freedom to all races in South Africa may have eliminated one of the 20th century’s more abhorrent ideologies. But new rights of participation, open expression and economic opportunity have at the same time unleashed, even nurtured, a host of evils that is inflaming civil conflict and shredding the delicate social fabric of young democracies across four continents.

“These are the forces that emerge in the post-euphoria phase of a political transition, and most threaten the legitimacy of democracy,” said Pauline Baker, president of the Fund for Peace in Washington, D.C.

Elections alone cannot always sustain democracy. They may no longer even be the most accurate barometer of democracy’s progress when change strikes virtually overnight.

Corrosive Forces Let Loose

Well into the 21st century, dozens of countries could be threatened by corrosive forces let loose when newly empowered citizens enjoy democracy’s entitlements but countries lack the checks and balances to rein them in.

Freedom’s excesses have produced many of the post-Cold War world’s worst crises. Freedom of independent identity--to be a Bosnian rather than forced to be a Yugoslav, for example--has fueled ethnic tensions from KwaZulu to Kashmir. Freedom to profit from free markets perverts societies from smoggy Mexico City to icy Moscow.

Freedom of movement has allowed a widely expanded flow of drugs, undermining the rule of law from Bogota to Bangkok. Equal access to limited resources has encouraged environmental devastation, famine and even chaos across Africa.

The accumulated cost could well be a major reversal of the democratic tide.

“The big question today is whether the recent wave of democratization will roll back, as has happened after every previous period of progress,” said Morton H. Halperin, former director of the White House Office on Democracy. “A lot of places will be struggling to maintain the legitimacy of democracy in the face of mounting problems.”

The most powerful antidote is a vibrant civil society, a network of voluntary, nongovernmental associations such as trade unions and student groups, neighborhood organizations and women’s clubs. By providing people with an alternative means of addressing the primary issues that affect their public lives, civil society both pressures and supplements government.

More than a century ago, French historian Alexis de Tocqueville identified America’s strong civil society as the key to sustaining its democracy. Many new democracies today, in contrast, lack the leadership and resources necessary to start and sustain vibrant private associations. To them, civil society remains a luxury.

At the 20th century’s end, two of freedom’s excesses particularly threaten democracy’s longevity. The first and greatest physical challenge is generated by tensions from ethnic, isolationalist and other social rivalries. The second, and the most stubborn moral challenge, is corruption.

Ethnic Strife Threatens Stability

The deadliest human tragedy over the past two years has been Hutu-Tutsi strife that has killed hundreds of thousands and uprooted millions in the grassy hills of Rwanda and Burundi. Nascent democracies in the tiny states have collapsed and even threatened to undo the behemoth state of Zaire in Africa’s belly.

“Multi-party democracy has always faced the danger in Africa that parties will be based not on ideas and programs but on ethnicity,” said Julius K. Nyerere, the former Tanzanian president who mediated the Central African crisis.

“We have to face the risk that multi-party democracy could break up some of these countries into tribal factions,” Nyerere said. “It could also break up the countries themselves.”

Dangers are not limited to developing countries. Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Muslim-Serbian strife turned football fields into vast graveyards and left 90% of the population of Sarajevo, the capital, dependent on foreign food aid. Only foreign intervention finally stopped the fighting.

The greatest military threat to Russia’s democracy is internal, from ethnic separatists in rugged Chechnya in the south. Since the Soviet Union’s demise in 1991, ethnic strife has involved 15 former republics--Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Russia and Tajikistan--and the ethnic differences among 30 of the former Soviet Union’s more than 100 ethnic groups could explode into violence at any time.

“Ethnicity is the most difficult type of cleavage for a democracy to manage,” said Marc F. Plattner, co-editor of the Journal of Democracy. “Because ethnicity taps cultural and symbolic issues--basic notions of identity and the self, of individual and group worth and entitlement--the conflicts it generates are less amenable to compromise than those revolving around material issues.”

Although smaller than other global dramas, the Donnybrook massacre is symptomatic of the dangers. Despite an inspiring political transformation, ethnic-exploited clashes have helped turn the new South Africa into the world’s most violent society not at war, according to international statistics.

But Phungula and her infant died not because new freedoms gave space to old hatreds. Rather, they were victims of a conflict between disparate visions of the future. As also happened in the Yugoslav federation’s breakdown and elsewhere, ethnic identity has been exploited to mask an array of other differences that emerge as democracy takes hold.

In South Africa, divergent outlooks pit the modernization and homogenization of urban life against the centuries-old legitimacy of tribal chiefs, courts and other traditional power centers in rural villages. They divide older from younger generations. They pit the educated, skilled and technology-wise against the uneducated, unskilled and unsophisticated. And they divide religious from secular.

In blood-soaked KwaZulu-Natal, the split is between Zulus who belong to President Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, South Africa’s largest and most ethnically diverse party, and the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party of Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi.

The ANC is seeking to create a new South Africa. Zulus, Xhosas, Vendas, Tswanas, Coloreds, whites, Asians and others would share power in a strong central state.

“We need to depoliticize the tribal institution, to say a chief is the leader of an entire community made up of people with different political views and not aligned with one party,” said Thabo Mbeki, deputy president and Mandela’s heir apparent.

Buthelezi’s party wants to preserve strong tribal powers to protect ethnic Zulu interests through self-rule. South Africa would be a loose federation of autonomous regions complete with their own armies--a goal that the ANC fears could lead to secession.

“We want South Africa to be a modern state but also to be an African state in the sense that some things that are part of tradition and laws should be recognized,” Buthelezi countered.

In fights with machetes, clubs, sjamboks and guns, more than 14,000 blacks have died over the past decade in little-noticed village raids and black township strife that were a subtext to the broader battle between blacks and whites. Fighting escalated during the 1994 transition to majority rule, when the stakes for blacks soared because one of their own would emerge as president.

“The model of democracy we are accepting assumes citizens make informed decisions because they are educated, understand an argument or can read,” said Lungisile Ntsebeza, program manager at the Institute for Multi-Party Democracy in Durban, KwaZulu’s capital. “When those preconditions do not exist, can you consolidate a successful democracy?

“Tradition can work only when it adapts to democracy. That’s the next big political challenge for South Africa.”

Before KwaZulu’s much-delayed June 1996 elections, the region appeared to be on the cusp of civil war; the government deployed 26,000 police officers and 3,600 troops to prevent trouble. Since then, the ANC and Inkatha have worked to curb violence.

But deep divisions remain, as the provincial elections reflected. Buthelezi’s Inkatha won in rural areas, while the ANC swept both black and white urban centers. And the killing continues; dozens more have died--29 in September alone--in KwaZulu political feuding since the election.

“Within the next decade, we’ll see a natural and inevitable erosion of the systems of traditional authority--through education, economic development and progress,” predicted Eric Applegren, director in Durban of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa. “In the meantime, it’ll be a bloody decade.”

The Freedom to Cheat and Steal

Corruption is just as challenging. The tide of democratic change since 1989 has coincided with new precedents in the quantity and imaginative quality of political immorality.

“A veritable eruption of corruption scandals has affected every region of the world, regardless of cultural background or gross national product,” said Moises Naim, a former Venezuelan industry minister and new editor of Foreign Policy magazine.

In the 1990s, corruption has contributed to the downfall of or has tainted democratically elected presidents in Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Panama and Mexico, and prime ministers in Spain, Italy, Turkey, Bangladesh and Thailand (twice).

Pakistan was added to the list in November when its president fired Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto--his longtime ally--for allegedly diverting millions of dollars to family coffers and undermining the judiciary, army and presidency. In elections this month, she was replaced by Nawaz Sharif, who was ousted in 1993 for corruption. Only 26% of Pakistanis voted.

The result is growing public cynicism about democracy.

“One of the fundamental reasons people accept democracy is that they believe there will be social justice and equity,” said World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn. “Corruption is the most corrosive challenge because it destroys that belief and desperately affects the confidence people have in government.”

An almost comic sequence of scandals in Brazil began with the impeachment of President Fernando Collor de Mello in 1992 for influence-peddling and graft two years after he was elected on an anti-corruption platform. Many of his congressional accusers were then charged with embezzlement linked to powerful committees on which they served.

Not surprisingly, a 1993 Brazilian poll revealed diminishing support for democracy; the reason most often chosen was “corruption/weak government.” Among international business people, Brazil is seen as one of the 15 most corrupt nations, according to a 1996 poll by Berlin-based Transparency International.

Worldwide, corruption today is widely considered even more pervasive under democratic rule than under dictatorships. Unchecked, it slows or even reverses transitions to democratic rule as the commitment to change increasingly gives way to a culture of self-enrichment.

Elections are common targets of corruption. In Colombia, drug cartels support candidates for elective office, allegedly including the presidency. In Russia, candidates for office are chosen by gangsters. Cash and other forms of payments influenced votes in Kenya’s first multi-party elections in 1992. Many voters in India, Pakistan, Thailand and Zambia expect to be bought, according to monitoring groups.

“In some countries, corruption has become part of the system,” Wolfensohn said. In Moscow, corrupt practices and organized crime are reportedly so entrenched that they may be harder to get rid of than were the Communists.

The injustice is not only in the amassing of power and resources at the top but also in disenfranchisement of those at the bottom. “Funds originally earmarked for new schools, hospitals and institutions to serve the most needy are often channeled into projects of negligible social value by officials receiving kickbacks from commercial contractors,” warned former Costa Rican President and Nobel laureate Oscar Arias.

Ironically, new democracies may be more vulnerable to increasingly transnational corruption because they are becoming members of the global community faster than many non-democracies.

Worldwide, 21 of 31 drug-producing and -transiting countries are new democracies, says a new report by Freedom House, a New York-based organization that ranks democracies. Among 33 money-laundering countries, 29 are democracies, 19 of them new ones.

“The rapidly growing power of organizations trafficking in illegal drugs is becoming a major--if not the decisive--factor in undermining democratic rule in many states, such as Colombia and Mexico,” said Adrian Karatnycky, Freedom House president.

Just two years into its new democracy, South Africa is again showing symptoms of the global trend. Some problems were inherited and have since grown worse; others are new.

Mandela’s ANC, which ran candidates in 1994 on a platform of helping the poor, got a boost from a $600,000 payment from a white casino mogul trying to get out of an indictment for bribery to win a gambling monopoly in the 1980s. The ANC angrily denied the charge, first made by one of its own members, until Mandela conceded last fall that it was true.

And it may be only the tip of the iceberg. “We battle a civil service that engages in activities which weaken the democratic order,” Parliament Speaker Frene Ginwala said in a recent speech. “We have uncovered widespread criminal behavior in the system of welfare payments, the collection of public revenue, the functioning of the criminal justice system, the theft of drugs and medicine from public hospitals and from salaries and wages.

“Most seriously, the police force is riddled with corruption, making investigation difficult. Special task forces have been appointed, and growing numbers of police are being charged.”

In KwaZulu alone, more than 275 police officers have been charged with corruption and related crimes since 1994. In Gauteng province, which includes Johannesburg, more than 8,300 cases involving police corruption and crime are under investigation, leading to more than 430 arrests so far.

South Africa: Virgin Territory for Crime, Drugs

Emerging from decades of isolation, South Africa is also virgin territory for drug syndicates and other criminals who now use it as a transit point and site of new criminal empires.

Nothing seems off limits. Within a year of Mandela’s victory, about $1.4 million was reported missing from a school meals program designed to provide juice and peanut butter sandwiches for the poor--one of Mandela’s pet projects.

“The loss of public support for the civil liberties essential for democracy could undermine the progress we have made in building a human rights culture in South Africa,” Ginwala warned.

Western nations allow, even encourage, their businesses to engage in bribery as they compete for new markets in the new democracies. Payment to an “agent” is a tax-deductible business expense in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Ireland, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Norway, Spain and Switzerland.

“Transitions are extremely prone to corruption. In many new democracies, the rules of ethical behavior don’t exist or aren’t understood. Profit motives drive everything,” said Peter Eigen, president of Transparency International. “New democracies need to create a culture that discourages abuse.”

In the 1990s, the key to stabilizing young democracies is civil society--just as it was in America’s early days.

“The Americans make associations,” De Tocqueville wrote, “to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the Antipodes; they found in this manner hospitals, prisons or schools. If it be proposed to inculcate some truth, or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society.”

Civil Society: Democracy’s New Barometer

By emphasizing common human concerns over ethnic differences, civil society also mediates disputes. “It’s a crucial arena for developing attributes such as tolerance, moderation, a willingness to compromise and respect for opposing viewpoints,” said Larry Diamond, co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

In light of weak voter turnouts worldwide, civil society may provide an even better barometer than elections of a democracy’s health and vibrancy.

On a cold Sunday morning recently, Ebrahim Modimtkwane convened the monthly meeting of the Johannesburg Homeless Assn. “The women in each family must come register their children so we can pressure the local schools to take them,” the 33-year-old former security guard told 60 men and women perched on old boxes or the sidewalk. “We also need to talk about feeding schemes. Some schools don’t provide food for children who don’t bring lunch.”

Next he urged women in nearby squatter camps to make weekly contributions of about $1 to create a community pool for medical emergencies. Then he opened the floor for debate on what to do if a squatter created trouble. One woman proposed eviction. A laid-off bricklayer favored a fine--often a harder punishment for the homeless.

“The government seems to think that families should take care of their homeless members,” Petros Mntungwa, the bricklayer, said after the meeting. “But the only good jobs are in the cities, and the rest of my family is still in our village. The Homeless Assn. is the only group looking after my interests.”

Yet as a solution to the ills and excesses in new democracies, civil society is often now handicapped by the very changes it originally helped bring about.

No Resource Base for Grass-Roots Leadership

South Africa’s civil society emerged in the 1970s as growing numbers of educated blacks mobilized to challenge the government and to do what it would not. Dozens of organizations--from funeral societies that turned into savings and loan associations to social action groups--grew up in the 1980s. Inkatha, originally a cultural movement, was an early representative of civil society.

Founded in 1979, Soweto’s Committee of Ten, made up of 10 leading black intellectuals and professionals, eventually grew into the South African National Civic Organization, or SANCO, with 45 branches in Soweto alone.

In the post-apartheid era, South Africa’s civil society has been depleted as hundreds of activists have moved into the government. “We are struggling to rebuild,” lamented Maynard Menu, SANCO president, at organization headquarters in Soweto, where the first uprising began in 1976.

Because 65% of black adults have six years or less of education, South African society does not yet have the resource base to tap alternative grass-roots leadership--a problem mirrored in new democracies worldwide.

“Civil society is a concept mainly of the middle class. And in many societies undergoing change, the middle class is growing very slowly. It hasn’t yet evolved to the point of taking up its own causes,” said Lena Kolarska-Bobinska, a Polish sociologist and director of a Warsaw public opinion research center.

In Poland, the birth of civil society, represented most visibly and energetically by Lech Walesa’s Solidarity trade union, marked the most successful challenge to Communist rule. But it too is now struggling to rebuild, a potentially lengthy process. About 60% of Polish adults have less than a high school education, and 30% live below the poverty line.

Mind-sets also have to change. “The concept of compromise in Poland is still almost a dirty word,” said Janusz Onyszkiewicz, a member of Parliament and former Solidarity activist.

“To be able to compromise is not seen as a democratic virtue,” Onyszkiewicz said. “It’s seen as a weakness or sellout. This is a big challenge for democracy, which is based on the ability to reach compromise, especially for minorities.”

Along the way, transitions are triggering strains as old allies grow into new relationships, sometimes as adversaries.

“There’s a lot of disgust with the government, which isn’t listening to our community. It doesn’t consult,” Menu said. “We have very little input, and we’re the largest [nongovernmental organization] in South Africa. Sometimes it’s hard to believe we once worked together.”

The biggest problem, as with every challenge to democracy, centers on expectations. With a more just government in place, the newly empowered who put it there anticipate expeditious justice.

“The tragedy for this country and other new democracies,” Applegren said in South Africa, “is that we now have a government committed to equality and fairness, and we have the general knowledge of what it takes to provide both.

“What we don’t have are the resources or time to achieve them before our own inadequacies begin to do us in.”

About This Series

After spreading to many new countries in the past decade, democracy is in trouble in many corners of the globe.

Sunday: The paramount reason for the imperilment of democracy is its failure to meet the economic aspirations that motivated democracy’s boom in the first place.

Today: New freedoms have unleashed a host of old evils. Two in particular--ethnic violence and political corruption--are corroding democracy from within.

Tuesday: As democracy spreads, it faces its most profound challenges from two of the world’s oldest cultures: Islam and Confucianism.

Wednesday: Devolution--the transfer of power from the national government to the regional and even the municipal levels--is the most dynamic trend in today’s new democracies.

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ON DEMOCRACY: WINSTON CHURCHILL

“No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.”

FREEDOM FACTS

Corruption

U.S. business lost out on almost 100 foreign contracts worth about $45 billion during the 14 months beginning in April 1994 becuase of bribery by foreign competitors.

--1996 Commerce Department survey

ON DEMOCRACY: ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

“Democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be.... Democracy, which shuts the past against the poet, opens the future before him.”

FREEDOM FACTS

Corruption

Of $20 billion in recent arms sales to 10 Third World countries, about $3 billion was kicked back to political and military officials.

--United Nations estimate