Heroes of 2019 shame us in fight for human rights
Any overview of the state of the world at the cusp of the new year will not offer much in the way of obvious reasons to be optimistic about the cause of human rights and democracy. The last time
New Year’s Day rolled round, there were already 13 years of global democratic retreat in the rear-view mirror, and looking ahead now, there are no dramatic signs on the horizon that the road might bend away from a deepening dystopian gloom.
But then, halfway through 2019, out of nowhere, millions of ordinary Hongkongers were marching in the streets to protest the noose that Beijing had been slowly tightening around their necks. It began with public expressions of outrage over an extradition bill that would have effectively annexed Hong Kong into China’s corrupt penal system. But a dormant democracy movement sprang back into life. After sustaining more than 6,000 arrests, 10,000 rubber bullets and 16,000 rounds of tear gas, the protesters continue their gallant resistance, and their movement flourishes.
In Sudan, a series of mass protests that began last December led to the overthrow of Omar Al-bashir in April, ending the brutal genocidaire’s 30-year reign of terror. Al-bashir, the first sitting president of a UN member state to be indicted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court, was tried and convicted in Khartoum on several corruption charges.
In Lebanon, mass protests against spiralling public debt, onerous taxes and the sectarian government’s corruption and gross incompetence quickly blossomed into a non-violent national uprising in October, leading to the resignation of Prime Minister Saad Hariri. But the protests did not end there. They have continued, and key demands now call for a complete rout of the country’s ruling elites. A popular slogan among Lebanon’s protesters is “all of them means all of them,” and that appears to include Hariri’s Hezbollah-backed successor, Hassan Diab, whose home was surrounded by protesters last weekend.
Mass protests against anti-democratic and authoritarian regimes continued to erupt around the world through 2019, in Caracas, Moscow, La Paz, Tehran, Baghdad, Algiers and elsewhere, to varying effect. In the most brutal and extreme response, the Khomeinist regime in Iran unleashed a crackdown that resulted in the deaths of anywhere from 450 to 1,500 protesters last month.
Throughout 2019, what was most conspicuous about the struggle for democracy was the front-line absence of the very institutions of the “rules-based international order” that are held out as the necessary enforcers of international covenants intended to restrain state-sanctioned barbarism and lawlessness. On Dec. 21, for instance, Russia and China vetoed a UN
Security Council resolution that would have re-authorized the supply of humanitarian aid to suffering civilians in Syria’s remaining opposition-held enclaves.
Owing largely to the disunity and indifference of the G7 democracies and NATO capitals — and the vacuum of American leadership, thanks mostly to the congenitally tyrant-friendly Donald Trump — Syria persisted as a festering wound in humanity through 2019. Already the source of the greatest refugee crisis since the Second World War, Syria was convulsing in further agony in the final days of 2019 — more than 250,000 people were fleeing massacres in Idlib Governorate carried out by Syrian President Bashar Assad, backed by Vladimir Putin’s air force.
Second only to Syria, Venezuela’s refugee crisis continues to burden several neighbouring countries. As many as six million people — one in five Venezuelans — have fled the poverty and turmoil brought about by the experiment in Bolivarian socialism conducted by Hugo Chavez and carried on by his successor, Nicolas Maduro.
Throughout 2019, there was some decency in the effort undertaken by the
Lima Group of countries to dislodge the Maduro regime in favour of Juan Guaido, the social-democratic president of Venezuela’s genuinely-elected National Assembly since last December. Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s former foreign affairs minister, deserves credit for helping to rally more than 50 countries to recognize Guaido as Venezuela’s legitimate head of government. But the Lima Group’s exertions have gone mostly nowhere.
In India, it has fallen mostly to student leaders and Congress party activists to rein in Narendra Modi’s depressing descent into Hindutva chauvinism, mostly recently exemplified by a Citizenship Law that discriminates against Muslims. If this keeps up, there goes the world’s most populous democracy.
But looming over everything is the unbridled weight and power of Xi Jinping’s police state, which continues to exert extraordinary influence in the corporate boardrooms and cabinet offices of several liberal democracies, perhaps most notably Canada.
President Xi enjoys complete impunity while he commits unspeakably merciless acts of cultural genocide against China’s Turkic Muslim minorities, Tibetan Buddhists, Falun Gong practitioners and Christians. Most brutally oppressed are the Uighurs of Xinjiang.
It was not the United States with its flags and loud noises, and it was not the hipster utopia of Canada, and neither was it Brexit-addled Britain or the exalted European Union that made any notable contribution to the defence of democracy or the cause of human emancipation in 2019. For that struggle, we had to turn to the bravery and sacrifices of teenagers in Hong Kong, widows in Khartoum, striking factory workers in Mashhad and young secularists in Lucknow.
And it will likely be people just like that who will be putting the rest of us to shame again in 2020.