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Democracy in the making

By Peter Preston Posted Jan 1 2005

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Elections are political crisis zones. Suddenly everything is up for grabs. Suddenly – at least in theory – voters can consign leaders to history, overturn governments, transform policies. This is democratic life in the raw, and, because democracy and an independent press inhabit the same beleaguered patch of freedom’s jungle, it also tends to be the rawest of times for journalists.

Take Belarus in October, a Soviet leftover staging parliamentary elections and a constitutional referendum which will allow President Alexander Lukashenko, another leftover of the USSR, to stand for a third term. European Union monitors are thick on the ground. The United States, prime advocate for democracy, is deeply engaged. Sanctions lie ready unless the polls are reasonably clean. This is a moment when Belarus can perhaps change course.

Yet what happens? In downtown Minsk, as the opposition stages a protest Oct. 19, a Russian cameraman with NTV, Konstantin Morozov, is beaten and kicked by security police. His face covered in blood, his camera destroyed. Vladimir Koscin from Ren TV gets much the same treatment. Meanwhile, an Associated Press photographer, Sergei Grits, is arrested for doing his job: “They told me that reporters were obstructing the work of the police and that I should have been further back. I replied that if I’d done that, I wouldn’t have been able to take any pictures.”

Another Russian crew from Channel One is busy filming but, strangely, Belarus TV can’t fulfill its normal role. It is “regrettably unable” to relay the footage to Moscow. Ren TV, meanwhile, doesn’t even need to be given the technical runaround. It has pictures of the opposition leader being beaten up but can’t show them. “We were told not to come to the studio because our film could be seized,” says Elena Slav, a reporter without her story.

Out of town, a reporter for Poland’s Informator Kulturalny magazine, Hanna Harasimowicz, gets into a polling station and asks how many people have voted during the week. She’s arrested and questioned in turn before being released. But at least she’s not beaten or kicked – like at least five other journalists in this spasm of violence. At least, like Pavel Sheremet of Russia’s Channel One, she’s not in the hospital with severe concussion and charged with “hooliganism.” And at least, like Veronika Cherkasova, an investigative reporter for a local independent paper, she’s not found dead in her flat with 20 knife wounds.

Did Lukashenko get his referendum victory? Of course. You barely need to ask. Will sanctions bring him down? He is already shrugging them aside – and hearing supportive noises from Russian President Vladimir Putin. Does election reporting ever get more dangerous and brutal than this? Not often. Lukashenko’s Belarus always walks on the wild side. But the significant thing from those few days in Minsk was how desperate the regime became. It needed legitimacy, and it assaulted the messenger from habit and instinct.

Not many elections around the world are remotely as bad. From Afghanistan to Australia this fall, and indeed from Kazakhstan to Ukraine to Indonesia, the news has been mixed: some smooth things, like Australia’s rumbustious but well-ordered contest; some testing but ultimately cheering things, like Indonesia’s peaceful change of government and Afghanistan’s return to a rough-and-ready version of democracy. But because democracy is an ideal that joins peoples and journalists around the world, because freedom has its responsibilities, you can’t package these things away in little boxes of isolation. They belong together, along with the most dominant one, America’s presidential election.

How does that rate on the freedom scale? No beatings, of course, and only metaphorical stabs in the back. But maybe the mixture still arrives rather too full of lumps.

In August, I followed President George W. Bush around Iowa as an interested reporter from a foreign land. There was a big rally by the river in Davenport. Could I walk in and watch the president perform? No. You had to apply in person at the Republican party headquarters, be scanned, screened and quizzed even if you were just the most ordinary Joe. On the meeting ground itself stood five rows of security volunteers, stopping and sifting the audience with eagle eyes. Security? Naturally, and understandably. But also, de facto, an insulation of the candidate that Lukashenko might have envied. Nobody heckled or catcalled. One leader’s security is another leader’s technical problem.

There, perhaps, is the greatest challenge to free journalism when power comes up for grabs. There is a call to perspective. I felt pretty strongly in 2000 in Palm Beach, Fla., as the Supreme Court pondered its own version of the president’s making. You may have felt the same Nov. 2, as Ohio queued and waited. Just what standards do we apply?

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe had 330 monitors in Kazakhstan. It reported widespread violations of electoral law and an overdose of media bias. Free speech campaigners, for their part, documented 39 cases where journalists’ rights were infringed, most of them involving camera crews barred from either the voting or vote counting. And if newspapers, like Uralsaya Nedelya, tried to answer back, what happened? A fleet of minivans roared through the city and bought every single copy of the offending edition (which was never seen again).

That was one farce piled on top of another as the President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s Otan party won with a full 60 percent of votes cast, followed distantly by the Asar party the president’s daughter, Dariga Nazarbayeva, leads. Yet the monitors gave this election marginally higher marks than last time. Kazakhstan, in its fumbling way, is trying to do a little better, just as Ukraine tried to leave Belarus at the bottom of every division a few weeks later. And there’s the need, yet again, for perspective.

I was in Kazakhstan in 2003, chairing a meeting about press freedom on behalf of IPI, which criticized the ruling authorities in pretty round terms. Press freedom groups turned up to put their case to IPI. It was, like the election itself, a difficult and often fraught scene, absolutely nothing to be overly proud of or much helped by the way foreigners were corralled in hotels and lacked contact with ordinary people. In truth, there was little there for journalists’ comfort.

But I also wondered, watching Bush in Iowa, what we’d have made of it if he had been standing for president of Kazakhstan instead. Nazarbayev travels in huge, heavily guarded car convoys and rarely sees his people. His rallies are carefully screened and devoid of hecklers. Reporters who raise evidence of dodgy oil dealings are eased into the cold. Television licensing is government business. The system is engineered to make it terribly difficult for new parties of dissent to make their mark. Big money pulls many strings.

This isn’t a society – or a press – ruled by outright fear. It is a society that, generally, knows which side its bread is buttered on. It doesn’t like too much scrutiny when the votes are counted. It reacts with aggrieved hostility when outsiders raise questions.

Was that, in all respects, so completely different from November in the USA? Or from the last time around in London, Paris and Rome? The fundamental point about elections remains much the same: This is power near the end of its tether, looking into the abyss of unemployment and using every means to hang on. The manipulations and evasions may be less obviously offensive because they come from monopoly media groups with a franchise to win or from spin doctors who seem so anxious to help. Taint comes with a smile as well as a snarl. But we also need, very carefully, to keep our balance.

Democracy, with the peoples’ choice upheld, isn’t a panacea. It hasn’t solved Kosovo’s problems, as its boycotted polls showed in October. It can’t save Ukraine from turmoil as Kanal 5 journalists went on hunger strike in October. It won’t be the new wonder ingredient that immediately heals Iraq’s wounds. But elections are also supreme moments for free journalists everywhere to flex their muscles and their intelligence.

Can Indonesia, a mighty land emerging from dictatorship, change rulers by a popular vote? It can. Does Afghanistan have the will to succeed as a democracy? Perhaps. The force of belief is there – the same belief that starts so many new newspapers and radio stations almost instinctively. Is there light in the end for Belarus? Only darkness. Alas. But there, too, as the attacks and evasions proliferate, journalism carries its torch. To vote in honesty is also to vote for change.