Sri Lanka's Tamil minority...

The power of the ballot

Nov 26th 2009 | COLOMBO
From The Economist print edition

Suddenly, it matters what Tamils think

SHAKING the rain out of his hair, Ravi Chandran boarded a state-run bus for Jaffna in the north and looked around. It would leave Colombo soon, at 11.30pm, and he wanted to grab a good seat for what could be a 16-hour journey. Mr Chandran, a 27-year-old businessman in a rugby jersey and jeans, is among an estimated 3,500 commuters from Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority to have used the new bus service since the government eased travel restrictions earlier this month. Civilians taking public transport to Jaffna no longer need defence-ministry authorisation; just three copies of their national identity card will do.

Since the government’s victory in the long war with Tamil Tiger rebels in May, Tamils have chafed under travel and other restrictions. But an election looms, and President Mahinda Rajapaksa is lifting at least some of these. This week, he signed a proclamation authorising a presidential election in January. His main challenger is expected to be his former army commander, General Sarath Fonseka. So the loyalties of the Sinhalese majority will be split, and Tamil votes decisive.

The government has already started courting them. On November 21st, after months of intense international pressure, the government announced that those displaced by the war will be free to move from December 1st, and that all of them will be resettled by the end of January. Of nearly 300,000 people interned in camps, almost half have already been ferried back to their war-shattered villages.

Like others clambering on the Jaffna bus this week, Mr Chandran was happy that mobility between the mainly Sinhalese south and the mostly Tamil north is increasing. But what should be a simple ten-hour trip home remains dogged by delays, checkpoints and intense security.

During a meeting with newspaper editors this week, Mr Rajapaksa presented his decision to go to the polls early as a sacrifice of two years of his term rather than as a shrewd move to capitalise on victory in the war. He said he wanted to allow voters in the north and east the chance to select a president. At the latest election in 2005, in which Mr Rajapaksa squeaked home by fewer than 200,000 votes, the Tigers ordered a boycott of the poll in Tamil areas.

Still, Tamils are not likely to fall for Mr Rajapaksa’s claim, or for the small, calculated steps the government is taking to win their votes. Niranjan Ganeshathasan, a law student, agrees that Tamils will swing the vote in January but he would much rather see the repeal of draconian anti-terrorism legislation, an acceptable power-sharing arrangement, and a truth-and-reconciliation commission to investigate what happened in the last weeks of the war. Mr Rajapaksa, he insists, will have to try harder, merely to entice apathetic Tamils to vote at all.

Suffragette city...

Little watched, Hong Kong's democratic fever is reaching its crisis...
Illustration by M. Morgenstern

THE struggle for democracy in Hong Kong is not like the struggle elsewhere. One venerable warrior takes holy communion alongside the territory’s chief executive before spending the rest of the day lambasting him. Another, a bluestocking barrister, struggles to pump her fist in time to the campaign music, after listening to Mozart at home. A former high official turned freedom fighter, dubbed “Hong Kong’s conscience”, famously peeled off from a march to pop into the hairdressers. Democrats and their “pro-Beijing” adversaries alike send their sons to Ampleforth, Winchester or other snooty British schools.

Part of the flavour of Hong Kong’s democracy struggle comes from the close intertwining of the elite in a small territory of 7m. And, as a columnist, Michael Chugani, puts it, the democratic fight is waged with democracy-style freedoms. People take to the streets, mock their rulers in the press, or take them to court. When Britain handed Hong Kong to China in 1997, these freedoms were not certain to endure. Yet the Communists in Beijing have endured too. Their opposition to radical change has given politics the air of a theatrical set-piece. Everybody knows his part.

That impression was reinforced on November 19th, when the chief executive, Donald Tsang Yam-kuen, proposed reforms aimed at widening democracy in 2012, the year of elections for his successor and for a new Legislative Council (“Legco”). The democracy camp, with 23 out of 60 seats in a Legco that is still rigged against it, condemned them as little different from earlier proposals, which Legco voted down in 2005. In the chamber, the official explaining the plan waited for the inevitable missile hurled by “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung, one of Hong Kong’s very few anarcho-Trotskyites. It proved to be a cardboard microwave oven, symbolising warmed-up fare. All good fun.

Though democrats rarely admit it, political theatre, within bounds, has brought incremental improvements. In 2003 protests led the government “temporarily” to suspend a deeply unpopular anti-sedition law imposed at China’s behest. In the 2005 debate about political reform, democrats’ main beef was the absence of a timetable for universal suffrage, promised in Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law. But in 2007, aware of growing local anger, China ruled that it would apply starting in 2017 for electing the chief executive, and from 2020 for Legco.

Five years seems neither here nor there. So why make a fuss about 2012? One reason is that it is still far from clear what China means by “universal suffrage”. Take the “functional constituencies”, a British legacy. These are made up of companies, professional bodies and trade unions, in which 16,000 organisations and just 211,000 individuals “elect” half of Legco’s members. The latest proposals leave the functional constituencies intact. Stephen Lam Sui-lung, secretary for constitutional affairs, argues that the chief executive in 2017, elected through universal suffrage, will have the mandate to reform them. Democrats naturally want these rotten boroughs abolished in favour of purely geographical seats, but Mr Lam says that “the government has not reached such a strong conclusion.” A bastard system may prevail. As for the chief executive’s post, high barriers to nomination might yet debar candidates with a democratic bent.

Audrey Eu Yuet-mee, head of the Civic Party, says Hong Kong needs a “road map” for getting to the final democratic arrangements. Now frustration is driving some to bolder theatre. Long Hair Leung’s League of Social Democrats and the Civic Party, made up mainly of barristers, propose that a legislative councillor in each of Hong Kong’s five geographical districts now resign, sparking by-elections in which each will campaign on the single issue of universal suffrage. They intend the by-elections to send a resounding popular message to Beijing. If that fails, some want democratic legislators to resign en masse.

The plan is a huge gamble for the pan-democratic camp, putting at risk the 20 seats democrats need to wield a veto, without which any old political package might pass. Worse, says Ronny Tong Ka-wah, a founder of the Civic Party, the proposal is splitting political parties, the pan-democratic camp, and Hong Kong at large. In particular, the Democratic Party, veterans of the democracy movement but against the by-election plan, are lambasted by younger radicals as traitors. Rather than hastening political reform, all this may encourage China to resist it. “For 20 years Beijing has wanted to divide us,” says Mr Tong. “Now we’re destroying the democratic movement without Beijing lifting a finger.”

Rotten boroughs, rotten fruits

Since legal freedoms have survived, some question whether democracy really matters at all. The answer is certainly yes, it does. As it is, Mr Tsang and his unelected team struggle with declining popularity and problems of governance. A point never acknowledged by China (unsurprisingly) is that democratic legitimacy would help the executive branch. Nor is it true, as China has argued, that Hong Kong is an “economic city” whose go-getting residents care not a fig for politics. That ignores Hong Kong’s under-represented poor. A highly skewed distribution of political rights is mirrored by equally skewed wealth. The average living space per person in public housing is 12.5 square metres (135 square feet), half that in China, which is eight times poorer. Thousands of men live in “cage homes” like livestock coops.

The pearl-wearing freedom fighters understand this. So do their conservative opponents. In the early 1970s industrialists insisted that an end to the seven-day week would spell doom for Hong Kong. Their sons today argue against a minimum wage, a social-safety net and an end to the functional constituencies. The difference is that their fathers would never have expected the Chinese Communist Party to be their staunchest ally.

Economist.com/blogs/banyan

What is happening in Switzerland....?

My compatrriots' vote to ban minarets is fuelled by fear...

It wasn’t meant to go this way. For months we had been told that the efforts to ban the construction of minarets in Switzerland were doomed. The last surveys suggested around 34% of the Swiss population would vote for this shocking initiative. Last Friday, in a meeting organised in Lausanne, more than 800 students, professors and citizens were in no doubt that the referendum would see the motion rejected, and instead were focused on how to turn this silly initiative into a more positive future.

Today that confidence was shattered, as 57 % of the Swiss population did as the Union Démocratique du Centre (UDC) had urged them to – a worrying sign that this populist party may be closest to the people’s fears and expectations. For the first time since 1893 an initiative that singles out one community, with a clear discriminatory essence, has been approved in Switzerland. One can hope that the ban will be rejected at the European level, but that makes the result no less alarming. What is happening in Switzerland, the land of my birth?

There are only four minarets in Switzerland, so why is it that it is there that this initiative has been launched? My country, like many in Europe, is facing a national reaction to the new visibility of European Muslims. The minarets are but a pretext – the UDC wanted first to launch a campaign against the traditional Islamic methods of slaughtering animals but were afraid of testing the sensitivity of Swiss Jews, and instead turned their sights on the minaret as a suitable symbol.

Every European country has its specific symbols or topics through which European Muslims are targeted. In France it is the headscarf or burka; in Germany, mosques; in Britain, violence; cartoons in Denmark; homosexuality in the Netherlands – and so on. It is important to look beyond these symbols and understand what is really happening in Europe in general and in Switzerland in particular: while European countries and citizens are going through a real and deep identity crisis, the new visibility of Muslims is problematic – and it is scary.

At the very moment Europeans find themselves asking, in a globalising, migratory world, "What are our roots?", "Who are we?", "What will our future look like?", they see around them new citizens, new skin colours, new symbols to which they are unaccustomed.

Over the last two decades Islam has become connected to so many controversial debates – violence, extremism, freedom of speech, gender discrimination, forced marriage, to name a few – it is difficult for ordinary citizens to embrace this new Muslim presence as a positive factor. There is a great deal of fear and a palpable mistrust. Who are they? What do they want? And the questions are charged with further suspicion as the idea of Islam being an expansionist religion is intoned. Do these people want to Islamise our country?

The campaign against the minarets was fuelled by just these anxieties and allegations. Voters were drawn to the cause by a manipulative appeal to popular fears and emotions. Posters featured a woman wearing a burka with the minarets drawn as weapons on a colonised Swiss flag. The claim was made that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with Swiss values. (The UDC has in the past demanded my citizenship be revoked because I was defending Islamic values too openly.) Its media strategy was simple but effective. Provoke controversy wherever it can be inflamed. Spread a sense of victimhood among the Swiss people: we are under siege, the Muslims are silently colonising us and we are losing our very roots and culture. This strategy worked. The Swiss majority are sending a clear message to their Muslim fellow citizens: we do not trust you and the best Muslim for us is the Muslim we cannot see.

Who is to be blamed? I have been repeating for years to Muslim people that they have to be positively visible, active and proactive within their respective western societies. In Switzerland, over the past few months, Muslims have striven to remain hidden in order to avoid a clash. It would have been more useful to create new alliances with all these Swiss organisations and political parties that were clearly against the initiative. Swiss Muslims have their share of responsibility but one must add that the political parties, in Europe as in Switzerland have become cowed, and shy from any courageous policies towards religious and cultural pluralism. It is as if the populists set the tone and the rest follow. They fail to assert that Islam is by now a Swiss and a European religion and that Muslim citizens are largely "integrated". That we face common challenges, such as unemployment, poverty and violence – challenges we must face together. We cannot blame the populists alone – it is a wider failure, a lack of courage, a terrible and narrow-minded lack of trust in their new Muslim citizens.

Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss citizen, is professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University. His most recent book is What I Believe