Realists (i.e. "Pragmatists" or running dogs
of the Status Quo) versus Dreamers (i.e. "agents of
change" or troublemakers)
or the Years of Living Dangerously

In our evolving post-Cold War world, where that mixed bag of Capitalism and globalization appears beyond challenge, oppressive regimes often face women leaders as perpetual thorns in their sides. Myanmar (Burma) is still contending with Aung San Suu Kyi. Turkey finally bent to international pressure last week and released Kurdish leader Leyla Zana from prison.

Iran's Shirin Ebadi recently gained international stature by winning the 2003 Noble Peace Prize. For years she was known as one of the "Three Musketeers." Her two other female comrades were Mehrangiz Kar, a more secular human rights and family lawyer, and Shahla Lahidji, an outspoken publisher specializing in books about women. (The Iranian regime managed to intimidate Lahidji into silence and Kar into immigrating to the US.)

Ebadi just did a tour of North America and granted an interview to a friend of mine. Along with University of Ottawa professor Amir Attaran, she penned an Op-Ed for the New York Times. The gist of their argument is that the World Bank should take loans away from antidemocratic countries and give them to democratic countries.

Thus the bank's "pragmatic" justification to lend money to oppressive governments is absurd. It amounts to giving secretive, frequently kleptocratic dictatorships priority — before the democracies have their fill. This handicaps both the citizens and leaders who together shoulder the hard work of sustaining democracies.

Instead, the bank should devise a kind of human rights scorecard. At a minimum, it should include the civil freedoms (of expression, of the press, of women) and the social and economic freedoms (access to health, education and property). The bank should monitor these freedoms and refuse to aid any country that violates them.

The kleptocratic dictatorship of Indonesia's Suharto finally gave way when the US withdrew its support during the Asian financial crisis. Currently, the former opposition leader Megawati Sukarnoputri is President.

Sukarnoputri recently reverted to Suharto-like tactics by expelling Sidney Jones, an American expert on Jemaah Islamiyah, Indonesia's chief terrorist group. During the 1980s Jones was an Amnesty International activist and worked for Human Right Watch for 14 years subsequently. She developed numerous contacts with the radical Islamic opposition which was being hounded into submission by Suharto at the time.

Just goes to show, pace the hard Chomkyean left, that the successors to Cold War-era, anti-communist, Western-backed regimes aren't necessarily American puppet states. In a some ways blindly naive column critical of candidate Kerry's foreign policy "realism," David Brooks writes about Cuba dissident Oswaldo Payá:

Then in the mid-1990's, he and other dissidents exploited a loophole in the Cuban Constitution that allows ordinary citizens to propose legislation if they can gather 10,000 signatures on a petition. They began a petition drive to call for a national plebiscite on five basic human rights: free speech, free elections, freedom to worship, freedom to start businesses, and the freeing of political prisoners.

This drive, the Varela Project, quickly amassed the 10,000 signatures, and more. Jimmy Carter lauded the project on Cuban television. The European Union gave Payá its Sakharov Prize for human rights.

Brooks writes that Kerry said he believed the Varela Project was "counterproductive" and a provocation.