The facts behind the news

By Samuel Baligidde

RECENTLY a Syrian Opposition Professor on a BBC programme, said he was perplexed when President Basher Al-Assad phoned-in and said he respected him but wondered why the Professor was not on his side whereupon the appeased academic said he felt great because Assad had recognised him; which reminded me of another BBC listener who said academicians who say good things about repressive regimes are ‘useful idiots’!

But in fact the Professor also mentioned something quite reasonable when he suggested that the Syrian Crisis should be resolved through political negotiations because Assad still has supporters whose concerns need to be addressed too.

By the same token, those campaigning for term limits may be faced with an uphill task; President Museveni has a substantial number of supporters, the controversial Afrobarometer findings notwithstanding.

The Ba’th Party has been in power since 1963 and has many supporters. Conceived as a Pan-Arab Socialist Party in Syria, which remained its main area of activity and influence, Al-Ba’th was manipulated by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Hafez Assad. Its doctrine was radically Pan-Arab and regarded regional parties of the various Arab countries as ‘branches of its national Arab structure’.

Neither of the rival Ba’th factions had influence outside Syria nor Iraq except for links with Libyan and Yemeni Revolutionaries, some cells in Lebanon, Jordan, the PLO and sabotage formations in Syria. Hafez Assad, former Syrian dictator and Basher’s late father, was a member of the National and Syrian High Command of the Ba’th Party. Regime change or removal of Basher may, therefore, not solve the problem. 

When the Opposition wins what is to be done with the minority that may still be supporting their erstwhile leader? Exile or liquidate them? Cognizant of the dangers of dictatorship of the majority Mwalimu Julius Nyerere asked what he should do with the minority that had not voted for a One Party State when a majority of Tanzanians voted to continue with Chama-Cha-Mapinduzi in a One Party dispensation.

Whereas the minority has the right to make the majority justify its policies, the majority can be just as problematic as the minority! Differences should be talked over not fought over; compromise and open debate not violence is the way forward indicated by the global good governance paradigms.

Harvey and Bather, authors of a classic book on the British Constitution opined that ‘although the majority governs, it has to recognise that there are limits to the restraints it can impose on the minority’ and that beyond a certain threshold, people become hardened and may not be prepared to submit to excessive repression. 

In the Essay on Liberty John Stuart Mill said that “absence of challenge engenders a mental laziness which causes people to lose the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error”. The arguments of the opposition should be tolerated not only because that is the way a parliamentary democratic system ought to work but that ‘even when they are not correct they provide that controversy without which the ideas of the majority are rendered stale and meaningless’!

The question then arises whether every policy a government initiates should be opposed for the sake of creating a semblance of a democracy? There are instances when both the Government and opposition should accept or oppose majority decisions for both moral and practical reasons.

A motion of censure is a waste of time because it can only succeed if there is balance between opposition and government MPs whereupon the uncommitted MPs can sway the vote towards the motion. 

The writer is an academic and former diplomat