A wave of strikes and protests by China’s upwardly mobile working class - factory workers, cab drivers, teachers, and even police officers - is causing concern within the ruling elite, prompting a clampdown on political dissent. Leading dissidents were detained last week after signing Charter 08 calling for greater democracy, an initiative which led President Hu Jintao to reiterate that China “will never copy the model of the Western political system.”
While officially committed to building a “harmonious society” and “putting people first”, China’s leaders have reason to be cautious about a citizen backlash to restructuring, notes The Economist. It quotes the China Labour Bulletin’s recent joint-report with Canada’s Rights and Democracy that millions of laid-off workers have been left near-destitute due to corruption and poor policy.
The ruling Communist party has long feared the rise of an independent labor movement, proscribing unofficial unions and arresting labor rights advocates. With the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations approaching, the regime is also wary of workers and other social protest groups linking up with unemployed graduates to create the kind of alliance that was crushed by the subsequent massacre.
Having recently conceded the legal right to collective bargaining, some observers believe the party will now be pushed to legalize strikes. “It’s increasingly untenable to view strikes as unacceptable, there are simply too many of them and they are everywhere now,” Robin Munro, China Labour Bulletin’s research director. “They’re happening whether they’re legal or not.”
Reducing unemployment among university graduates will be the government’s main priority next year, prime minister Wen Jiabao said at the weekend. “The creation of a huge population of educated unemployed is worrying for the ruling Communist party, which is keenly aware of the historic role disgruntled students have played in inciting rebellion,” the Financial Times reports, noting that “Mao Zedong, who led the Communists to victory in 1949, was himself an educated son of a rich peasant who had his scholarly ambitions thwarted.”
The regime has been eager to claim credit for China’s dramatic economic growth, basing its legitimacy on performance - its ability to deliver jobs and rising living standards - rather than ideology. But that means that citizens are also blaming the government for the current economic downturn and resulting job losses.
“Government leaders portray themselves as the answer to every problem, expressing their willingness to use public resources to help those left behind by the new prosperity, rather than counting on new businesses to create jobs,” notes one observer, highlighting an ideological shift back toward statism.
The Communist party is “struggling to contain economic fallout,” suggests another observer. “They are all too aware that without the promise of wealth, or if that promise crumbles, then their claims to legitimacy crumble as well.”
The regime’s ideological statism and suspicion of independent organizations means that China’s civil society remains small and unable to act as a shock-absorber - delivering services and providing a channel for peaceful protest - as it does in free societies.
Because an NGO is “essentially an assembly that is capable of collective action and powerfully challenging the government politically,” notes Beijing scholar Kang Xiaoguang, the government has been wary, tolerating social service NGOs addressing issues like poverty alleviation, but keeping any remotely political NGOs under tight control.
The government’s strategy has shifted from across-the-board banning of independent groups to one of “control by categories,” notes Kang, cited by the must-read China Digital Times. Many NGOs have become GONGOs as a result of “elite-ification” - with Chinese retired officials and elite offspring taking key jobs - while many other NGOs have been limited by size. The regime tolerates local NGOs but is wary of national-scale independent groups. It is as if a “high-voltage power line” was suspended above them, he writes.
Events in Zimbabwe took an ominous turn today as Robert Mugabe’s regime claimed that the air force commander, Air Marshal Perence Shiri, had been the victim of an assassination attempt. With the collapse of mediation talks, the always-fragile power-sharing agreement is effectively dead and indications suggest the regime is preparing an all-out offensive against the democratic opposition.
Tendai Biti, secretary general of the Movement for Democratic Change, fears that the regime will use the incident, in which Shirii was reportedly shot in the hand, as a “Reichstag” excuse to suppress all opposition. “Mugabe can kill two birds with one stone,” Biti said. “He can use it as a way of attacking us, and then attacking whatever faction of ZANU-PF he wants to decimate.”
A leading member of the Joint Operations Command, the security service hard-liners currently guiding Mugabe, Shiri is deeply implicated in recent atrocities. He is also Mugabe’s cousin and headed the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade that perpetrated the Ndebele massacres of between 8,000-20,000 civilians from 1982 and 1987.
Opposition forces have faced incrementally growing repression over recent weeks. A march by several hundred civil society activists of the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) was attacked by police using tear gas and dogs. International labor unions condemned the arrests and beatings of more than 48 union activists, including the arrest of Wellington Chibebe, Secretary General of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions.
Other activists have been quietly spirited away or ‘disappeared’ in a manner eerily reminiscent of Latin America’s worst military dictatorships.
Where is Jestina Mukoko? asks Norman Geras, a British blogger who has written consistently and intelligently on the crisis in Zimbabwe. Mukoko resigned from state television to lead the Zimbabwe Peace Project, a human rights monitoring network. He links to this report detailing abductions of Zimbabwean human rights activists and to this story detailing the circumstances of Mukoko’s abduction:
She has collected evidence of tens of thousands of abuses in the past decade. Her monthly reports have detailed the routine tyranny of violence, the shortage of food and the denial of free speech that characterise Zimbabwean life today, particularly in rural areas.
Mukoko pioneered the use of information technology to map Zanu-PF’s attacks on its opponents. Before elections last March she presented her findings publicly in a Harare hotel. She knew her audience included members of the CIO but nevertheless set out patterns of violence in the 2002 and 2005 elections and predicted where trouble would occur in 2008.
The places she identified - such as Manicaland and Masvingo provinces - were indeed subjected to Zanu-PF campaigns of mass eviction, communal beating and murder. Opposition figures believe much of Zimbabwe’s current tragedy might have been avoided if international observers had followed her advice and gone to such trouble spots.
Mukoko has been an outspoken critic of Zimbabwe’s system of supplying food. Her analysis shows food is supplied to those showing loyalty to the ruling party and is denied to opposition supporters.
Masked law enforcement officers today sealed and searched the offices of Memorial, one of Russia’s leading human rights organization, RFE-RL reports. Telephone lines were cut and the hard discs extracted from the group’s computers.
The incident is the latest of a series of infringements of associational rights. A spike in independent labor action recently prompted violent attacks on Alexei Etmanov, the leader of the Ford-Vsevelozhsk union and co-chairman of the Interregional Trade Union of Autoworkers (ITUA). A strike in Yekaterinburg by 250 migrant workers from Tajikistan, notes analysts Paul Goble, “raises the specter in the minds of many Russians of more such moves but could in the current environment easily lead to violent clashes.” He quotes one union leader’s remark that it cannot be “excluded that the action [of the Tajik workers] will become the start of mass actions” by migrants in other Russian cities.
The country’s leaders seem aware of the threat and are seeking to dodge responsibility. “The Kremlin’s chief ideologist is worried about threats to Russia’s middle class”, RFE-RL suggests. It quotes a speech last Friday by Vladislav Surkov, the first deputy Kremlin chief of staff, which identified the source of the threats as — the West:
“If the 1980s were the times of the intellectuals and the 1990s were the times of the oligarchs then the 00s can be seen as the epoch of the middle classes. The main task of the state during the slump must become the preservation of the middle class, the defense of the middle class from the waves of poverty and confusion that are coming from the West.”
Kremlin ideologist Vladislav Surkov
But a former adviser to President Vladimir Putin argues otherwise. “Russia’s crisis has nothing to do with the U.S. or global recession,” Yevgeni Gontmakher told Eurasia Daily Monitor. “Assertions that the U.S. has crippled us are pure propaganda. Whatever is happening over here, we have done with our own hands.” Gontmakher insists that “Russia’s systemic crisis resulted from the state’s polices adopted as of 1999,” when Putin rose to power, which “unhinged Russia’s economy long before global recession started.”
Putin’s former associate is one of several analysts warning that further economic disintegration could generate social unrest and political upheaval. As Eurasia Daily Monitor notes:
Gontmakher’s story ….. was pointedly titled “Novocherkassk-2009,” in an allusion to the major workers riots on June 1 and 2, 1962, in the city of Novocherkassk, which were suppressed by the Soviet Army; 23 people were killed and dozens jailed in the unrest. The article raised quite a commotion by drawing a picture of a shaky social peace collapsing once the 1962 situation starts repeating itself with prices and tariffs increasing drastically, wages dropping, workers laid off in droves, and food disappearing from the shelves because of collapsing imports and inadequate domestic production.
If Russia is “poised” in a “twilight” between “authoritarianism and freedom“, the current trajectory looks ominous.
The “color revolutions” ushered in democratic transitions, but also prompted a pronounced backlash against freedom of association worldwide, according to a new report from Freedom House. Governments are taking calculated action to restrict nongovernmental organizations, human rights groups and independent trade unions, notes Freedom of Association Under Threat: The New Authoritarians’ Offensive Against Civil Society.
“There are reasons to believe that the current round of restrictions is not a passing phenomenon,” said Arch Puddington, Freedom House director of research. “These setbacks can largely be traced to the emergence of a new breed of authoritarian leaders who employ repressive tactics that are much more sophisticated than those used in the past.”
From 2004-2007, freedom of association deteriorated in almost every region except Western Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, with the most pronounced declines in the Asia-Pacific region and Latin America, while associational rights were already endangered in the former Soviet Union and the Middle East/North Africa region. The analysis draws on the organization’s Freedom in the World data and includes reports on countries where associational rights are particularly threatened: Algeria, China, Colombia, Egypt, Iran, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Russia, Uzbekistan, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
“The officers of NGOs are seldom arrested, placed on trial, sent to gulags, exiled, or murdered, though all these things do happen from time to time,” the report states. “Today’s authoritarians instead rely on legalistic or bureaucratic methods to hobble civil society,” including tax investigations and funding restrictions. “And because the drive against associational rights is conducted largely without violence, it evokes little notice from the outside world.”
The report notes that organized labor has experienced severe constraints on associational rights since the end of the Cold War, not least in Latin America where it confronts a range of challenges, from right-wing death squads in Colombia to Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez’s “tried and true Marxist tactic of establishing parallel unions in an effort to bring the labor movement under his political control.”
Related news:
- The “closing of political space” in Ethiopia was raised on a recent trip to Addis Ababa by David J. Kramer, Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. He drew attention to a draft legislation on civil society organizations that will impose a 10 % threshold of foreign financing and 30% cap on administrative overhead. “Restrictions on the kinds of activities that would be affected by this legislation - basically, any organizations that are considered foreign or receive foreign financing that engage in human rights issues or issues dealing with the rights of women or the rights of children or the disabled, or conflict resolution - all of those things would be at risk under this legislation,” he noted.
- Idasa, the Southern African democracy group, has called for the release of Mario Masuku, leader of Swaziland’s banned Pudemo party who was detained three days ago under anti-terrorism legislation. Masuku has played a “leading role in promoting democracy and free political association and activity,” Idasa notes.
- Last week’s terrorist bombings in Somaliland claimed the lives of 31 people, including Hussein Mohamed Farah, formerly an officer of the Institute for Practical Research and Training, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy.
- David DeCaires, “one of Guyana’s extraordinary leaders“, and the founder and editor of its leading independent newspaper has died of complications following a heart attack. DeCaires broke the state media when he helped establish the Stabroek News in 1986 with a $110,000 grant from the National Endowment for Democracy. He has since contested the Guyanese government’s abuse of public advertising for politically-punitive purposes.
- You will find the testimony of independent Cuban labor leader Pedro Pablo ÁlvarezRamos testimony (in Spanish) tothe OAS Inter-American Commission on Human Rights here. It lasts approximately 46 minutes.
Xiao Huazhong is one of 600,000 workers nationwide suffering from pneumoconiosis, the debilitating lung disease, with up to 10,000 new cases each year.
Xiao is demanding compensation from his former employer in court, one of a growing number of “public interest litigation” cases in which non-government organisations and lawyers are collaborating.
The China Labour Bulletin, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy, is helping Xiao after he was turned away by official agencies. The group’s Geoff Crothall says the main hurdle is often getting courts to hear workers’ rights cases:
“Local mine owners and government officials are often the same person,” says CLB’s Geoff Crothall. Even if there is no direct connection, “it’s in everybody’s interest to boost economic production” to keep mines open, regardless of health and safety hazards.
Much of China’s economic miracle has been secured at the expense of workers’ basic rights, says a new report from China Labour Bulletin and Canada’s International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, commonly known as Rights & Democracy.
No Way Out: Worker Activism in China’s State-Owned Enterprise Reforms draws on five years of research and CLB’s extensive experience of litigation in defense of labor rights. The restructuring and privatization of state-owned enterprises have led to workers being denied access to official channels of redress - as in Xiao’s case, the criminalization of worker protests, and the denial of employees’ rights to social security, to freedom of association and to freedom from arbitrary detention.
“The Chinese government insists that the ‘right to subsistence’ takes precedence over human rights but the SOE reform program inflicted great harm on millions of citizens on both these counts,” said Han Dongfang, CLB’s Executive Director. “This is a major social problem, and a solution to it is long overdue.”
Growing labor discontent and the failure of official agencies to address workers’ grievances is causing pronounced shifts in the country’s labor relations. A new law in Shenzhen, the heart of China’s manufacturing sector, guarantees unions’ rights to free collective bargaining.
For the first time since Communist rule was imposed in 1949, trade union officials are openly insisting that union should represent workers’ interests alone. “The trade union is a matter for the workers themselves,” said Chen Weiguang, chairman of the Guangzhou Federation of Trade Unions, adding enterprise unions must change their role from “persuading the boss” to “mobilizing the workers.”
Communist orthodoxy insists that unions should be two-way channels, representing workers’ interests at the workplace level but also functioning as ‘transmission belts’ for conveying Communist ideology and enforcing the rule of the party.
“After three decades of economic reform, we’ve reached the point when something had to be done,” said CLB’s Han Dongfang. “Today in Shenzhen we can see the worst excesses of capitalism, but also the desire of the people for social justice and - with these new regulations - the willingness of the government to move towards capitalism with a human face.”
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has undermined democracy by packing the courts, curbing labor rights, attacking civil society and threatening freedom of expression, Human Rights Watch reports. As if to confirm the report’s veracity, the regime responded by expelling the group’s representatives.
Chávez has tried to project himself as a champion of democracy throughout Latin America, the report notes. “Yet his professed commitment to this cause is belied by his government’s willful disregard for the institutional guarantees and fundamental rights that make democratic participation possible,” it concludes.
The report came amid speculation that the government is planning to revive a contentious International Cooperation Law to restrict the freedom of activity, expression and assembly of NGOs and other civil society groups. The National Assembly will reportedly start and accelerated process to approve 16 new laws, including the International Cooperation Law which received initial approval two years ago.
The New York-based group praised Chávez for introducing the 1999 constitution that enshrines basic democratic rights but said the regime had failed to implement its provisions. It condemned the short-lived 2002 coup, but criticized the president for exploiting the putsch “to justify policies that have degraded the country’s democracy,” according to the group’s Americas director, Jose Miguel Vivanco.
“While this derailment of Venezuelan democracy lasted less than two days,” the report notes, “it has haunted Venezuelan politics ever since, providing a pretext for a wide range of government policies that have undercut the human rights protections established in the 1999 Constitution.”
Discrimination on political grounds and open disregard for the principle of separation of powers enshrined in the 1999 Constitution have been defining features of the Chávez presidency. The regime has “effectively neutralized” the judiciary as an independent branch of government through court-packing.
“In the absence of credible judicial oversight, the Chávez government has engaged in often discriminatory policies that have undercut journalists’ freedom of expression, workers’ freedom of association, and civil society’s ability to promote human rights,” states the report.
The Bolivarian revolution has been implacably hostile to the independent labor movement. The government has undermined workers’ right to elect their representatives by requiring state oversight of union elections; denied the right to bargain collectively; undermined workers’ right to freely join the labor organization of their choice; and undermined workers’ right to strike by banning legitimate strike activity and engaging in mass reprisals.
”Through its systematic violation of workers’ right to organize, the Chávez government has undercut established unions and favored new, parallel unions that support its political agenda,” Human Rights Watch concludes.
The report details the government’s efforts to stifle and intimidate civil society groups. The report recognizes that governments may reasonably investigate and prosecute credible allegations of criminal activity, and regulate foreign funding in the interests of transparency. But it concludes that the regime’s measures have “gone beyond these legitimate forms of accountability and regulation.”
The report cites the case of Súmate, a non-profit group engaged in voter participation in the recall referendum against Chávez in 2004, which was charged with conspiracy on the grounds that they had received a grant from the National Endowment for Democracy.
The gravity of the charges was “particularly troubling”, the group notes, since the prosecutor sought a conviction for crime of “conspiracy to destroy the nation’s republican form of government,” which can carry a 16-year prison sentence. The report notes that both Súmate and the NED confirmed that the funds were not used for electoral activities but for educational workshops.
After three years, the case against Súmate Vice-President María Corina Machado, her colleague, Alejandro Plaz, and two other Súmate staffers remains open.
Zimbabwe's generals threatened to take the country down to the level of Somalia, said MDC senator David Coltart
A stalemate over the allocation of Cabinet portfolios is threatening to undermine the fragile power-sharing deal reached last week between Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF, and Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Fundamentally, we have a deadlock threatening the whole process, not only over the ministers but the [10 provincial] governors as well,” said Tendai Biti, MDC secretary general.
The fragility of MDC-ZANU-PF relations is evident in the fact that official state media continue to insult the MDC leadership despite prohibitions against such attacks in the accord. The abrupt resignation of South African president Thabo Mbeki, who has mediated the talks, will not help resolve the current impasse.
Democracy activists and foreign governments responded cautiously to the pact, reached after several weeks of talks. The pact is a “capitulation” by the MDC, as Tsvangirai will have only “cosmetic authority”, said Lovemore Madhuku, head of National Constitutional Assembly, a former grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy.
“The MDC must have control over key ministries responsible for restoring economic stability to Zimbabwe, facilitating the distribution of humanitarian assistance, and overseeing the country’s security and police services,” said a Freedom House statement last week. The democracy watchdog also called for transitional justice issues to be addressed, and for credible elections within two years, repeal of repressive laws, civil society involvement in constitutional revision and for monitoring parties’ compliance with the power-sharing deal.
But David Coltart, a senator affiliated with the Mutambara faction of the MDC, defended the agreement as the best possible deal in the circumstances. Opposition negotiators agreed to painful compromises because of the urgency of the humanitarian crisis and because of fears that Mugabe would be deposed by hard-line generals who would take the country “down to the level of a Somalia,” he told a Wilson Center meeting in Washington, DC. last week.
The deal entailed a “substantial transfer of power”, Coltart said, while admitting that a sizeable ZANU-PF Cabinet presence represented a “poisoned chalice” as they would do everything to sabotage genuine change.
The next three to six months will be characterized by instability, said Karen Alexander, an analyst with the Institute for Democracy in South Africa. Morgan Tsvangirai is perceived as the key to attracting Western aid and investment - “the man with the ATM card for the nation,” she told the Wilson center event. Recent events in Zimbabwe raise wider issues for African democracy, including the dangers of adversarial first-past-the-post electoral systems that generate “exclusionary” outcomes, and - as in Kenya - of accommodating post-electoral violence that subverts the democratically-expressed will of the people.
According to Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy, the fact that authority to govern derives from the will of the people means that the power sharing deal “in itself is a negation of the very fundamental requirement that assumption of office into national political leadership must be anchored in credible electoral processes.”
The national unity government represents a subversion of the national constitution, said another NED grantee, the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions. “Only a Transitional Authority should be put in place with a mandate to take Zimbabwe to fresh, free and fair elections that will hopefully not be disputed by the parties. ”
The role of the international community is crucial to the new unity government’s survival, writes Knox Chitiyo. The MDC is expected to deliver on foreign investment, but the European Union, United States, World Bank and International Monetary Fund are waiting for the new government to “prove itself”. These institutions are proving reluctant to hand over the ATM card until Cabinet positions are determined.
“Every day that passes without Prime Minister [Morgan] Tsvangirai being able to point to a tangible improvement in day to day life, the more threadbare the agreement, signed just a week ago, will look,” writes Africa analyst Michael Holman. “Books and medicines, agricultural inputs and spare parts, should have been on their way to Zimbabwe within hours of the deal being signed.”
It is easy to criticise Tsvangirai’s “inconsistent and erratic leadership”, he concedes. But “the fact is western governments have been outmanoeuvred” by Mugabe. Already under fire from his ZANU-PF base for conceding too much power, Mugabe will fiercely resist efforts to unshackle the media and restore the independence of the police and judiciary.
Southern Africa analyst RW Johnson believes the crunch will come when Tsvangirai moves to replace Gideon Gono as Governor of the Reserve Bank and to professionalize the security forces, especially if invites the British Military Assistance and Training Team (BMATT), which trained Zimbabwe’s army and police after independence. BMATT’s first order of business would be to help crack down on ZANU-PF’s murderous “war vets” and Green Bomber youth league, he writes.
The next few weeks will show whether Mugabe “intends to subvert the deal now reached - or whether he will be pushed aside by a determined opposition.”
Bronislaw Geremek
“Today’s world would be worse than it is without [Bronislaw] Geremek’s contribution to its history,” world-renowned philosopher Leszek Kolakowski asserts. The process that ended communist rule in Poland “was also the process that started the chain of events which in subsequent years led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany, and finally the collapse of communism in Central Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union,” he observes. “We have no idea how this process would have been possible without the Polish example, how many years and how much bloodshed it would have caused.”
Kolakowski’s tribute was one of many written and verbal testimonies delivered at a memorial meeting for Geremek held at the National Endowment for Democracy today. An earlier European memorial event heard tributes from his former colleague Adam Michnik, amongst others. The Polish dissident historian’s “responsible moral engagement”, his friendship and solidarity “shaped our identity and connected us to history in ways that exceeded the dreams of our founders,” said Carl Gershman, the NED’s president.
Nadia Diuk, NED’s Senior Director, for Europe and Eurasia described the substantial funding provided for the underground opposition’s cultural and educational activities. Geremek was central to what Senator Richard Lugar called the “auspicious alliance” between workers and intellectuals, typified by the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR), that was a rebuke to the communist claim on workers’ political allegiance, countered the deliberate “atomisation of society”, and led to Solidarity’s formation, the catalyst for communism’s ultimate collapse.
The US labor movement was a particularly vital and vocal supporter of Solidarity, Gershman and Diuk stressed, with AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland their leading advocate. Geremek was overwhelmed when Solidarity leaders received a tumultuous 15 minutes’ standing ovation at the AFL-CIO convention, declaring he “had no idea we had such support.”
Geremek’s legacy transcends national borders, said Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs and Democracy Paula Dobriansky, who recalled strategizing with Geremek and Solidarity leaders alongside then deputy secretary of state John Whitehead. Few could have appreciated how those sessions for planning solidarity for Solidarity would have such momentous consequences.
But Geremek did. Librarian of Congress James Billington recalled how, during a long walk in Rome in the late ‘70s, the medieval historian turned political prognosticator, predicting communism’s demise and explained “what would happen exactly as it did happen.”
The moment that Geremek, a “profoundly humane human being,” signed the NATO accession treaty as foreign minister of a free Poland, signaling an end to the country’s historical insecurity and vulnerability, was both a profound historical and personal moment for him, said former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Geremek was a Pole in Europe and a European in Poland, said Brzezinski, a sentiment echoed by his close colleague Adam Michnik. Geremek “wanted a democratic Poland united in solidarity with a democratic and strong Europe. Now that he is gone, we see how much he accomplished for such a Poland and such a Europe,” Michnik wrote. “He belonged to the tribe of great Kosmo-Poles, such as Chopin and Paderewski, Adam Czartoryski and Czeslaw Milosz, and-toutes proportions gardées-John Paul II. When times were hard, or virtually hopeless, as they were under martial law in the 1980s, Bronek repeated after Conrad, ‘One must.’”
NATO accession was a high point in the short-lived political ascendancy of the dissident generation described by Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl. Geremek was a “quintessential representative of a unique European fraternity” of dissident intellectuals, forced into menial jobs and isolation under communism, yet proceeding to build an alternative samizdat politics and underground culture that led to the 1989 revolutions. Yet this generation was too readily and tragically marginalized by the professional politicians of the new democracies they had nurtured, partly because theirs was a politics “based not on nationalism or populism but on morality.”
Max Kampelman recalled how he described Geremek’s arrest as a “grave moment” at the CSCE Helsinki conference in Madrid in February 1982. He had been arrested as a “political gangster” shortly being attacked in a Moscow radio broadcast as a “Jewish Zionist”.
Both of his parents were murdered in Auschwitz and Geremek escaped the Warsaw Ghetto. Yet he was one of those “who not only somehow managed to survive the Shoah, but also managed, perhaps against all the odds, to find faith in humankind after the darkness that descended,” said David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee. “Geremek, early in life, became a witness to history, then, literally, its prisoner-first under the Nazis, later the Communists,” Harris noted. “He lived, remarkably, to become an author of history,” and a celebrated author about history.
Geremek was “one of the great heroes of democracy in the twentieth century,” wrote Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State and chair of the National Democratic Institute. At the Warsaw conference that founded the Community of Democracies, Geremek highlighted both the value and the fragility of freedom. “The emergence of democracy as a universally accepted form of government is the most important development of our century,” he said. “But another lesson of the century is it that democracy is by no means a process that goes from triumph to triumph.”
Johns Hopkins University professor Charles Gati recalled the tale of two citizens asked to sign a petition against a totalitarian regime. “I must, I have a child,” says one. ‘I can’t, I have a child,” says the other. Geremek was no moral absolutist and would sympathize with both positions, he said.
A former communist - he left the party in 1968 in protest at the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring - his commitment to justice, equality and human dignity eventually led him to “a definite and unequivocal condemnation of the communist utopia and its totalitarian practices,’ write Radek Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister.
For his fellow dissident and former Czech foreign minister Alexandr Vondra, Geremek’s legacy is more important than his laudable personal qualities, “particularly now that some politicians, especially in Western Europe, bury their heads in the sand to avoid tough challenges of the future, and resort to empty talk and more or less blatant anti-Americanism.”
Polish Ambassador Robert Kupiecki recalled the historian Geremek telling him that the reputation of a tradesman used to be measured not by the wealth he left behind on his death, but by his debts. These were the measure of his integrity and the number of his friends. Geremek’s liabilities must be considerable.
Michnik, Geremek (center) and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana
Some weeks ago, we featured remarks by Adam Michnik extracted from the speech he gave at the funeral of the historian and dissident Bronislaw Geremek, an early adviser of the Solidarity movement and former foreign minister of Poland, who died in a car accident on July 13.
The whole speech is now available - and well worth reading - here.
In cooperation with the Embassy of Poland, the National Endowment for Democracy is holding a memorial meeting this week to honor the life and work of Bronislaw Geremek, whose life was tragically cut short when he died in a car accident on July 13. The meeting will feature tributes from James Billington, Librarian of Congress; Zbigniew Brzezinski, CSIS; Jackson Diehl, Columnist, Washington Post; Nadia Diuk, National Endowment for Democracy; Paula Dobriansky, Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs; Charles Gati, Johns Hopkins University, SAIS; David Harris, American Jewish Committee; Amb. Max Kampelman, Fried, Frank, LLC; Amb. Robert Kupiecki, Embassy of Poland; and Senator Richard Lugar.
The event will also feature written remembrances from Madeleine Albright, Leszek Kolakowski, Adam Michnik, Alexandr Vondra, and Senator Barbara Mikulski.
A survivor of the Holocaust, Bronislaw Geremek became a leading academic, dissident, statesman and diplomat in post-war Poland. A gifted social historian, he joined the Solidarity trade union movement in 1980 and emerged as a key advisor to Lech Walesa in the Gdansk shipyards. Imprisoned during martial law, Geremek played a leading role in the 1989 Round Table Agreement that negotiated an end to Communist rule in Poland, setting in motion the events that led to the collapse of Soviet domination throughout Eastern Europe. Geremek’s contributions to his country’s democratic transition were constant in the years after 1989, culminating in his role as foreign minister, when he guided Poland’s entry into NATO and the European Union.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
11:00 - 12:15 pm
Buffet luncheon reception will follow tributes
1025 F Street, NW Suite 800
Washington, DC 20004
RSVP (acceptances only) to rsvp2@ned.org
