Reasonable To Worry

Peter Hitchens writes:

I do get a bit tired of the emoting about Syria and its hideous prisons by Western media and politicians. The West knew perfectly well about this, and took advantage of it, when it sought help from the then President Bashar Assad against Al Qaeda. That’s why Bashar met the Queen and Sir Anthony Blair.

In the same way the West knows just how cruel many of its current friends in the Middle East are, and does nothing about it. But the case of Maher Arar goes much further. Mr Arar, an innocent Canadian citizen, was kidnapped by the US authorities while changing planes in New York. They claimed he was a terrorist. He was then handed over to Syrian secret police demons in Damascus. Nobody would listen to Mr Arar’s pleas that he was innocent. But no expense was spared in despatching him by private plane to a Syrian cellar.

They tortured him for a year on behalf of the USA. I will spare you the full details, but Amnesty International summed it up like this: ‘He was beaten and interrogated for 18 hours a day for a couple of weeks. He was whipped on his back and hands with a 2in-thick electric cable. For over ten months he was held in an underground dark, damp grave-like cell – 3 x 6 x 7 feet – where he could hear others being tortured. After a year in Syria, Maher was released without any charges.’

The US government is still pretty shifty about this episode. But a Canadian commission publicly cleared Arar of any links to terrorism, and the government of Canada later settled out of court with Arar for several million dollars.

And:

It was about this time of year, 35 years ago, when I set off eastwards from Berlin, full of fear. I was seeking to get into Romania, then an iron Communist tyranny. I finally made it to the capital, Bucharest, as dusk fell on Christmas Eve. The city was by then gripped by a sort of madness.

I was warned to beware of snipers at the entrance to my hotel, and zigzagged ludicrously through the snow with a suitcase in one hand and a typewriter in the other. Nobody sniped, but later I sheltered under my bed while red tracer bullets flew by the window in the square outside.

It was more or less impossible to find out what was going on, though the city’s hospitals were full of sad, wounded people, under third-rate Communist healthcare. I went because rumours had been spreading of severe discontent, which exploded on December 21, 1989. The country’s Communist leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, was heckled during a speech.

This unthinkable act of bravery by the hecklers started an avalanche that took only four days to sweep the despot to his death – an ugly kangaroo court followed by a so-called ‘execution’. This looked more like an assassination to me, when it was shown on Christmas Day on Bucharest TV.

The general reaction of Europe and the world was one of uncomplicated joy, as it always is when evil regimes fall (see Syria now).

But Romania has not been especially happy since. And I was shocked to learn last week that its latest presidential election had been cancelled. Yes, you read that right. Romania’s Supreme Court has simply cancelled the election, because of a danger that the wrong person would win.

Let’s simplify this. Calin Georgescu, who has said nice things about Vladimir Putin and is definitely not politically correct, did very well in the first round on November 24. As a result he was to be one of two candidates in the decisive second round, which should have taken place on December 8. Now the first round has been wiped from the record and the second round will never happen. Full new elections are promised, but can they now be fair?

I can see why many in Romania do not want Georgescu to win. He’s not my kind of guy either. But that’s the problem with democracy. You have to accept the outcome, or it is not democracy. And producing thin ‘intelligence’ claims of ‘Russian intervention’ really isn’t enough, in a grown-up country, to halt a free poll.

Two things have struck me about this event. The first is that it happened at all. The second, equally important, has been the absence of protest from bodies who endlessly condemn rigged elections elsewhere. The EU Commission has, as far as I can find, avoided saying anything. A search for Nato condemnation also yielded no results.

There has been no sign of one of those ‘Rose’ or ‘Orange’ or ‘Dignity’ revolutions that erupt so spontaneously where the West is contesting election results that favour Moscow. Though I should point out, as a former revolutionary, that organising a spontaneous uprising takes a lot of planning, money and hard work.

The whole thing looks to me like good-old fashioned humbug, and those who have been silent about it should be ignored when they protest, in future, about suppressions of democracy that don’t suit them.

In the meantime, it might be reasonable to worry about how Romanians might react to the cancellation of their democracy after only 35 years.

Romania was not part of the Soviet Bloc. It had a ghastly regime, not least from the point of view of the valiant Byzantine Rite Catholics. But not a Soviet satellite one. In fact, that regime had particularly close ties to Britain. To our shame, but there we are. English and French, rather than Russian, were taught in schools. No Romanian troops participated in putting down the Prague Spring. More than once, the Soviet Union came to the brink of invading Romania. There was absolutely no question of giving back what is now the Romanian-speaking western part of the cut-and-shunt state of Moldova.

That bring us to the National Salvation Front, overthrowers of Nicolae Ceaușescu, and originators of the present political class in Romania. Their objection to Ceaușescu, a Knight Grand Cross of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath until the day before his execution, was not that he was pro-Soviet. It was that he was anti-Soviet. They emerged out of the Moscow-backing, because Moscow-backed, faction within the Communist Party. In 1989, the Soviet Union still had two years left to go, and few were those who thought that it would collapse entirely.

When a kangaroo court convicted and executed the Ceaușescus for the "genocide" of 34 people and for having dared to throw parties at their house on major holidays, then it was not only the beginning of dodgy "genocide" convictions: of Luis García Meza Tejada for fully eight people, of Augusto Pinochet for fewer than a hundred, of Mengistu Haile Mariam in absentia, of his opponents even including aid workers, and of Jean Kambanda without trial, with Slobodan Milošević never convicted at all.

It was also, as it turned out, the last great triumph of the Soviet Union, taking out a man who was vicious and brutal in himself (like García Meza, or Pinochet, or Mengistu), but who was nevertheless a dedicated opponent of Soviet power. Those who took him out have run Romania ever since. They now do so within both NATO and the EU. And within both of those, when faced with any serious challenge to their power, they simply cancel the election.