"A Vote For
Starting Small "

The Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, April 4, 2004

By Mustapha Tlili

This year sees a flowering of elections in the Muslim world: parliamentary elections in Malaysia last month; parliamentary elections in Indonesia tomorrow, followed by presidential elections in July; presidential elections in Algeria on Thursday; general elections in Tunisia in the fall; municipal elections for the first time ever in Saudi Arabia, also in the fall; and, the world hopes, elections in Afghanistan and Iraq before the year is out.

The point is that — just as Monsieur Jourdain in Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme speaks prose without knowing it — the Muslim world is practicing one of the basic activities of democracy.

The Bush administration should focus less on the promotion of what seems, to many Muslims, an ideologically loaded, Western concept — democracy — and more on improving the practice of elections. Such a shift would, among other effects, help clear the atmosphere of mistrust resulting from the United States' military intervention in Iraq. The collective memory of Western interference from the 19th century on renders Muslim peoples highly suspicious of any reforms, including democracy, that come from the barrel of a gun.

The emphasis on elections would have the added advantage of putting to the test Islamist movements advocating "Islamic" constitutions, forcing them to follow through on their stated commitment to democratic governance. Such a commitment was recently affirmed by Islamist participants in a workshop on Islam and elections held in Amman, Jordan, under the auspices of the Islam-West Dialogues program of the New School University's World Policy Institute. One of the conclusions of the workshop was that "Islam, in its central teachings, embodies and embraces constitutional, democratic, just, and accountable electoral government."

Likewise, non-Islamist authoritarian regimes, many of them friends of the United States, would have a harder time fishing for objections to the administration's call for democratization if Washington simply offered technical assistance toward making their countries' elections better-run, and eventually freer, fairer and more credible.

A similar, pragmatic approach was adopted by the United Nations at the end of the Cold War, when the international community had to deal with nation-building in so many failed states in both the disintegrating Soviet empire and in regions that had been caught in the confrontation of the superpowers. An Electoral Assistance Division was created in the United Nations Secretariat, and thanks to its expertise and support, hundreds of elections in Central Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe were run in a more credible fashion.

What should be the content of the new policy emphasizing democratic behavior? First, a process of civic education must be instituted to make citizens more aware of their rights and duties in a credible electoral system. Both formal, textbook education in schools as well as public outreach initiatives should aim at instilling and deepening these values. This is one of the areas in which the Bush administration should invest significantly as it pursues its strategy of educational reform in the Muslim world.

The new policy also should endeavor to promote the setting up of independent electoral commissions. There are already some good examples of such commissions in Muslim and Muslim-majority countries, including Nigeria, Malaysia, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Democracy is slowly taking root in those countries - and in no small measure thanks to the pugnacious work of their independent electoral commissions.

Most countries of the Muslim world, however, run elections through their interior ministries, a system that leads to the frequent manipulation of elections. Independent electoral commissions should help correct this problem.

An election-promotion strategy should further entail technical assistance in the choice of voting systems, the delineation of electoral constituencies, voter registration, and, more generally, the establishment of rules, regulations and procedures that would enable elections to be conducted in a nonpartisan manner and would legitimize their outcomes

Today, the idea of participatory governance through elections is gaining worldwide acceptance as the best guarantee of citizens' rights and freedoms. Shouldn't the administration, instead of pursuing an increasingly resisted democracy crusade, aim at melding what is emphasized in the heritage of Islam - just and good governance - with Western, democratic ideals, through free, fair and credible elections?

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"A Vote For Starting Small "

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"A Vote For
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