Prepare the ground for a real transition to democracy

[shira]

Hosni Mubarak has gone. The people’s will, unprecedentedly, has been done.

The king is dead. Long live...er, who or what, exactly? February 11, the day Mubarak internalized that he could hold on no longer as president of Egypt, eerily coincided with the date in 1979 when the shah’s regime collapsed, paving the way for the Islamists to take the control of Iran they have ruthlessly maintained ever since. It also, extraordinarily, coincided with the date in 1986 when Natan Sharansky walked to freedom from behind the Iron Curtain in East Berlin, presaging the collapse of the Soviet Union.

At the heart of a long interview in these pages on Friday, Sharansky set out a formula which, if followed, just might ensure that the process that caused the overthrow of Mubarak in 2011 ends more beneficially than the one that saw the ousting of Reza Pahlavi 32 years ago. It is a formula that, if heeded, just might offer the opportunity of a region-remaking process of genuine democratic reform, rather than, as unfolded in Iran, simply clearing the stage for a headlong decline into vicious, anti-democratic – oh, and implacably anti- Israeli – Islamist extremism.

The Obama administration immediately embraced the Egyptian public’s demand for democratic change late last month – having, appallingly,failed to do likewise when Iranians took to the streets after the fraudulent presidential elections there in 2009. But it has shown no clear appreciation of how it might use its influence to help Egyptians ensure a transition to sustainable democracy.

more...
http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=207962

[no_hypocrisy]

1. And it's a shame that it won't be here.

[shira]

2. a little more from the article...

The Egyptians, in Sharansky’s view, must be spared a similarly premature lurch into elections before democratic institutions are built bottom-up.

When election day comes, the people must know that they can confidently vote their conscience. A range of political parties must have been granted the free conditions to organize, to reach out to the public, to promote their agendas directly and via a fair, unintimidated media. The voters must be confident that they will face no persecution for their political choices.

They must be spared elections in a climate of fear – spared the bleak choice between the Mubarak loyalists and the only currently organized opposition, the patient, muchunderestimated, far from benign Muslim Brotherhood.

It may have surprised some readers to hear Sharansky, a hawkish figure in partisan Israeli political terms, sounding so enthused by the ongoing uprising of the Arab masses.

But his argument is that partnerships with dictatorships are unsustainable – that people cannot permanently be repressed, that they will push for freedom the moment they sense weakness in their tyrannical leaderships.

In his assessment, Israel and the West are fortunate that this Arab revolution is unfolding in countries still closely tied to the West, in societies yet to have been battered into an overwhelming retreat toward Islamic fundamentalism.

[Ken Burch]

3. You'll not that Sharansky was NOT calling for a continuation of dictatorship

n/t.