By Alice Stevens

At the moment, it appears likely that Dilma Rousseff, Lula De Silva’s chosen successor, will succeed in the run-offs of Brazil’s presidential election at the end of October and become Brazil’s first female president. Rousseff’s election will continue a trend of increasing female leadership in the countries of South America. She will join the ranks of Michelle Bachelet, who became Chile’s first female president in 2006, and Christina Fernández de Kirchner, who is the current president of Argentina.

However, while the political leadership of these women is a success in itself, female leadership does not guarantee that issues involving women’s rights will be addressed. Luiza Erundina de Sousa, former mayor of São Paulo, said that having a woman as president “is not enough to drive changes towards gender balance, however capable she may be. She needs support from men and from civil society organisations.” 

These female leaders have done little to disrupt the status quo. While quota laws have been introduced in South America over the last twenty years, women are still poorly represented in Latin American politics. Though female participation in Argentina’s parliament has risen under non-voluntary quotas, in Chile’s parliament women comprise only 14 percent in the lower chamber and 13 percent in the senate. Participation in Brazil’s parliament is even lower. Patricia Rangel, of the Feminist Centre for Studies and Advisory Services in Brazil, insists that it is no good just electing women, what is needed is the election of women with an awareness of gender inequity.

As far as she has indicated, Dilma Roussef will do little to deviate from her predecessor’s politics. In the last two years, Lula enjoyed an 80 percent approval rating.

A great number of Brazilians asserted that they would vote for whomever Lula thought best. In fact, Lula’s endorsement of Rousseff is probably the single most important factor to her success in the polls. Rousseff has never held elected office and has given little indication of her policy initiatives, other than continuing Lula’s. It’s hard to tell whether Rousseff’s gender is a help or a hindrance given Lula’s extensive involvement in her campaign.

However, the success of the third party candidate, Marina Silva of the Green party, took analysts by surprise when she received almost a fifth of the vote in the election of October 3. Silva’s popularity, more so than Rousseff’s, suggests that Brazilians are embracing the notion of a female leader and that gender may be a motivating factor in the success of female candidates in this election.

In a recent survey, the Pew Research Centre found that 70 percent of Brazilians think it would be a good idea to have a female president, compared with 33 percent of U.S. citizens who answered this question in 2007. While the trend of female leadership may not indicate a radical transformation of Latin American gender issues, it is a sign of progression towards gender equality.

By Conor Dempsey

For the past year diplomats have suspected that the youngest son of North Korea’s enigmatic dictator, Kim Jong-il, was being prepared to succeed his ailing father at the head of a nuclear-armed state with one of the largest armies in the world. In recent weeks this has become a certainty.

Kim Jong-un is estimated to be only 27 years of age. Kim Jong-il succeeded his own father Kim Il-sung, the nation’s founder, who ruled until his death aged 82. Kim Jong-il took over power already aged 53 and having had 14 years of political experience during which he consolidated support within the ruling Korean Worker’s Party, the only party that truly exists in North Korea. In contrast, Kim Jong-un has no political and little military experience. Until recently he had not been mentioned by name in the North Korean media. The heir to the leadership of the only dynastic communist state in the world is said to have been educated at a private Swiss school under a pseudonym.

Kim Jong-un, now known as the Young General, was promoted to four-star general on 27 September. The next day he was appointed to the number two military position in the Worker’s Party. This was the first large party gathering since 1980 when Kim Jong-il was promoted to the position he occupied until his father’s death.

The bizarre business of succession in North Korea would be of little more than esoteric interest to the outside world were it not for the potentially severe threat posed by North Korean instability.

North Korea has the fourth largest standing army in the world and has tested nuclear weapons. Approximately 25 percent of GNP is pumped into the military. It is estimated that as much as 20 percent of the male population between 17 and 54 is in the army.

In October 2006 North Korea became the eighth nation to acquire nuclear arms. The country’s history of nuclear development is a tale of diplomatic failure and brinkmanship. American satellites identified the construction of a nuclear reactor at the start of the 1980s and by the mid-1990s it was suspected that North Korea possessed nuclear weapons.
The Clinton administration’s agreement to halt the nuclear programme never amounted to anything, a pattern diplomats have come to expect in negotiations with North Korea.

In 2002 George Bush named North Korea as part of the “axis of evil” and senior Korean government officials interpreted this as a declaration of war. In 2003 Kim Jong-il threw out the remaining international inspectors of the Yongbyon reactor facility.

Experts estimated that North Korea had enough plutonium to build five or six nuclear weapons. When the first test occurred in 2006 the blast was significantly weaker than expected prompting speculation that the weapon had malfunctioned. Despite its failure the test was condemned by other nations. This aggravated North Korea and it announced its permanent withdrawal from all talks and renewed its nuclear programme.

In May 2009 a second nuclear bomb was tested making it clear that North Korea will do as it pleases in the development of a nuclear arsenal. Thankfully there is some indication that the technology needed to mount a nuclear warhead is not within reach of North Korea at present. On two occasions it has failed to launch a satellite, though on one of these occasions it scared Japan by sending a rocket over it and into the ocean.

Kim Jong-il has led his nation on a course of extreme isolationism so that North Korea has only one, albeit important, ally: China. It is for the most part because of Chinese support that Kim Jong-il has been able to ignore economic sanctions. China is concerned with stability; it does not want hundreds of thousands of refugees crossing its border in the case of an upset.

If the Young General is to take power the outside world will watch in trepidation to see what sort of leadership arrangement emerges. It may be the case that the best outcome in the short term is for Kim Jong-un to seamlessly take power and thus avoid much of an upheaval. That is not necessarily a likely outcome. The massive military is kept in check by the appointment of generals to positions of political power and by appointment of those close to the dictator to positions of high military power. If military leaders consider the young leader easy to displace North Korea could be plunged into a civil conflict. It is possible that China and the US would find themselves on opposing sides of a struggle involving a nuclear-armed country under military rule.

This possibility is just one of many where further instability might be introduced into international relations with North Korea in the event of succession. The world will be keeping a close eye on one of the most secretive and erratic nations.

By Neil Warner

We are in familiar territory once again in the Holy Land: bland statements of mutual cooperation from people who openly despise each other cover an underlying consensus that is entirely pessimistic. It is negotiations time again, a now fairly reliable and predictable festival in the region since being inaugurated 17 years ago in Oslo.

The general agreement is that the recently initiated talks have been doomed to failure from the beginning, and they have already stalled with Israel’s refusal to continue its settlement-building freeze in the West Bank, an agreement which had always excluded East Jerusalem.

Much of the language of even neutral sources relating to the situation in Israel and Palestine is so misleading as to make one think that they were documenting it in a different time or place, except that this rhetoric is so effective that it has, in the minds of many people, indirectly managed to turn fiction into reality. It has created a conflict whose terms of reference in public and elite consciousnesses are invented or at least refracted into something almost totally different from what logic and history should tell us.

What am I referring to here? Consider the way the peace process is presented. An analogy which is frequently drawn is with Northern Ireland. The peace process is regarded in the media as a case of two sides coming together, overcoming their intractable and irrational differences for the greater good of peace. Moderate leaders in both Palestine and Israel, just like the two sides in Northern Ireland, must come to terms with reality.

Peace will finally come when the two sides reach an understanding of each other’s perspectives and the grievances. That is the account at its most neutral, but many have an anti-Palestinian slant, particularly in America, giving the impression that the Palestinians are the main extremists.

This is all nonsense. The reality is that the “peace process” is a fraud which, though increasingly obvious, continues to be publicly swallowed by most foreign leaders and commentators. Remember the context of all this. The Zionist movement from its beginning promised Jews around the world that its project was to regain control of this “land without a people” that is modern Israel-Palestine.

The Palestinian presence in their historical homeland is quite simply a nuisance to be gotten rid of, and it has been the isolated problem of the Israelis for 60 years. Starting with a population of approximately 12 percent in 1900, the Jews numbered only about one third of the population at the time of a favourable partition plan which gave them 55 percent of the land in 1947. Arab rejection of this unfair plan gave the Israelis an excuse to turn their dream into reality, and force the exodus of 700,000 people from their homes. The land already has a people? Well too bad, we’ll just force them out.

This worked once. The current, undisputed lands of Israel consist of 78 percent of the former British colony of “Mandate Palestine” out of which they were established in 1948. But the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 left them once again with the problem of wanting the land but not its people. Nonetheless, they pursued colonisation of their new conquests for 20 years, but when the Palestinians got uppity in the 1980s they were forced into a new approach.

It was then that they discovered the wonderful “peace process”. Yitzhak Rabin initiated it with Arafat in front of the world’s media in 1993, and to show his good will, immediately began acceleration of settlement-building. He never intended to give up anything he wanted. The most Israel has ever even allegedly offered was at Camp David in 2000, when it proposed a Palestinian state with no control over its border, without the Jordan Valley or East Jerusalem and with no compensation for refugees. The peace process essentially hopes to isolate the Palestinians and keep all of their land that’s useful.

Negotiations usually involve a series of incremental compromises on both sides. How has this happened in this case? Israel has given in on things it never wanted in the first place and Palestine has clung on to the least it is entitled to because they have no alternative. That is the full glorious history of the peace process.

Israel will not compromise because it is under no pressure to. The conflict will only be solved once we stop seeing it as a case of ethnic and religious tension and instead see it as a racist colonisation of the weak by the strong, once we stop comparing it to Northern Ireland and start comparing it to South Africa, and once we stop trying to solve things by mutual understanding and start to realise that the simplest way forward is simply to turn the screw on Israel.

By Iseult McLister

In the last few months some of the heaviest rains ever recorded put a fifth of Pakistan under water. They have affected over 17 million people and increased the number of those living below the poverty line from 33 percent of the population to 40 percent. Agriculture and transport links have been destroyed and there are grave fears about the winter months as snow is expected in many regions.

$300m have been donated because of a United Nations appeal for emergency relief but more is needed. There are, however, international concerns over how relief aid will be put to use by President Zardari, who has been accused of corruption in the past. A UN official said that “donors are worried over the possibility of large-scale corruption and want to see evidence of a very efficient utilisation of their funds before they step forward”.

Fears are that instability in Pakistan will lead to “spillover effects” in neighbouring Afghanistan where food prices have been adversely affected. It’s not just infrastructure which has been damaged – Pakistan’s “sphere of influence” has suffered.

One major government policy has been tackling Taliban militancy; however, this has inevitably been put on hold because the more urgent internal crisis has taken priority. For example, the army is leading the relief effort and although they maintain that the situation has not obstructed military actions on the borders, they rule out any new deployments against insurgents in the next few months.

Islamist charities with links to extremist groups have been helping with relief and they have filled a gap, in some cases, left by the state’s own rescue operations. These charities do not have the resources of the army, international donors or United Nations agencies but they are quick to respond and have much support amongst the people. Camps for the victims of flood damage could be open to extremist propaganda, where the desperate and homeless could be vulnerable to their ideology.

Pakistan may be facing a cultural and societal shift towards more strict orthodox Islam and perhaps in the wake of the flood damage a fertile breeding ground will be created for this as modernity and prosperity are washed away. The crisis was expected to stabilise after one month but as Neva Khan of Oxfam has said they are “still in phase one of an increasing catastrophe”.

By Alice Stevens

Last June, the United Nations reported that the production of the coca leaf, the main ingredient in cocaine, has fallen by 60 percent in Colombia in the last decade. A top producer in the 1990s, Colombia has been devastated by years of violent drug-related conflict.

Unfortunately, the drop does not represent a victory in the ongoing war against drugs in South and Central America but simply a shift in production and trafficking. As Colombia cracks down, drug trafficking has moved elsewhere. In Peru, production of cocaine has gone up by 55 percent in the last decade; Bolivian production has doubled over the same period.

Mexican drug lords have evolved to become the most powerful criminals on the continent. In a recent interview, Hillary Clinton went as far to suggest that the situation in Mexico resembles that of Colombia in the 1990s. “It’s looking more and more like Colombia looked 20 years ago, where the narco-traffickers controlled certain parts of the country,” Clinton said at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. “These drug cartels are showing more and more indices of insurgencies.” The Secretary of State even indicated that it may be necessary to send US troops into Mexico.

President Barack Obama has rejected the comparison between Mexico and Colombia but nonetheless, the situation in Mexico has reached crisis point.. While martial intervention may not be the answer, a change in policy is essential to resolving the deeply entrenched and violent conflicts in the country.

On 25 August, 2010, 72 Central and South American migrants were found murdered on a ranch in Tamaulipas in what is the biggest drug cartel massacre to date. The murders are assumed to be the work of the Zetas, a cartel described by the Mexican Defence Ministry as “the most formidable death squad to have worked for organised crime in Mexican history”. A survivor of the massacre testified that the Los Zetas opened fire on the migrants after they refused to carry out assassinations for them.

This atrocity is just the latest in a pattern of ongoing and escalating violence that has characterised Mexican life since Mexican President Felipe Calderón declared “war” on the drug cartels shortly after his election in 2006. Since then, drug violence has claimed more than 28,000 lives.

Felipe Calderón was elected amid allegations of electoral fraud. His declared “war on drugs” and the militant propaganda that accompanies it gives his presidency a legitimacy it failed to achieve in the election. Edgar Buscaglia, organised crime expert and a leading critic of Calderón, calls it the “Afghanistanisation of Mexico”. The war has provided the government with a powerful goal around which they can garner support. Mexico has become a war zone, and the army, not the police, have been used to combat the drug trade.

This militarisation has been heavily criticised both outside and inside the borders of Mexico The army practically occupies a number of communities in the north, where they control checkpoints, curfews and inspections. Human rights groups have accused the army of rape, pillage and extrajudicial killings.

But the strongest criticism is that Calderón’s militaristic tactics have unleashed a torrent of drug violence that the government is unable to control. Support for Calderón’s government has gradually diminished as it has become increasingly apparent that the war on drugs is a losing battle.

The United States, citing human rights concerns, have recently decided to withhold a portion of promised antidrug aid under the Merida Initiative. Nik Steinberg, Mexico researcher for Human Rights Watch, said, “Any withholding of funds would be a step in the right direction, but given the total impunity for military abuses and widespread cases of torture, none of the funds tied to human rights should be released”.

Calderón’s government insist that the violence is simply an inevitable outcome in a war against the cartels In a recent interview, Calderón said: “I wish there was less violence, but – being honest – that is not foreseeable in the short term, in which high levels of violence will remain. Violence will decline over the medium and long terms.” He points out that his government was the first to take on the drug trafficking organisations.

Such assertions do not conceal the fact that, whatever the intent, Calderón’s tactics have failed. Instead of pumping money into weaponry and deploying tens of thousands of soldiers and federal police to take on the cartels, the government needs to put money into alleviating the social problems that drive young men into the drug trade.

The failure to fully address money laundering, political corruption and poverty has not only triggered more violence but has allowed the cartels to penetrate even deeper into society. The current expensive and arduous not worked.

For the war in Mexico to reach any kind of resolution, the policies of the current government must change. However, change also needs to be implemented outside Mexico. The United States and Europe cannot ignore their own responsibility in the drug wars that have devastated countries like Colombia and Mexico.

As Calderón has pointed out, it is American consumers that fuel the demand and American weapons that help maintain the cartel’s violent campaigns. Instead of focusing solely on stamping out supply in other countries, the West needs to address the issue of demand in their own countries.

The problem is never just one country. For instance, Guatemala has also experienced a surge in violence in recent years, largely related to the movement of drug trafficking into the country. In what is known as the balloon effect, if production is squeezed in one place, it will balloon somewhere else. The West and the Mexican government need to be part of a larger, unified approach to an issue that reaches far beyond the borders of Mexico.

By Alice Stevens

On 24 August, militiamen disguised in army uniform stormed a hotel in Mogadishu and killed 32 people, including six members of parliament and five members of Somalia’s security forces.

Two weeks later, Somalia’s main airport in Mogadishu was attacked by suicide bombers, and five insurgents blew themselves up as they attempted to reach the terminal. At least eight people were killed in the attack. Al-Qaeda affiliates, al-Shabab, who control most of the capital and the country, have claimed responsibility for both attacks.

Somalia has not had a secure government since the collapse of the government of Siad Barre in 1991. Since then, the country has experienced almost constant warfare as Islamic fundamentalists wage war in an attempt to topple the Western-backed transitional government.

Though protected by African Union troops, the government is weak and ineffectual, and unable to help the majority of the population. The Mogadishu airport is one of the government’s few areas of control in the war-torn capital, and the recent attacks have starkly highlighted the government’s failure to protect its citizens and impose order over anarchy.

The conflict in Somalia is one of international significance. Hundreds of foreign militants are currently in Somalia supporting extremist groups like al-Shabab and Hizbul Islam. Like al-Qaeda, al-Shabab has an international agenda. During the World Cup, in July 2010, they carried out bombings in Kampala, Uganda, killing more than 70 civilians.

Such events have led to an increase in international assistance to Somalia. While Somalia’s own military is almost nonexistent, there are currently about 7000 African Union troops in Mogadishu. Furthermore, the country’s rampant piracy has attracted the attention of navies from around the world. However, the government cannot rely only on international support. Without radical internal change, the violence will continue to ravage the country.

“Change of a community can’t come from outside if the community itself doesn’t make a change,” Somali President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed recently told a Mogadishu news conference. Insurgent control and lack of popular support for the current Somali government have prompted some analysts to propose that the government should be allowed to fall.

It is argued that if Islamist fundamentalists take power, the population would soon tire of a repressive regime and replace it with a less extreme government. At least in that case the government would have popular backing. Even with international intervention, the current government cannot hope to defeat the violence and power of groups like al-Shabab without the support of the Somali people.

By Ines Novacic

When the woman I childmind for asked me what I was doing for the summer back in March, I relayed my plan about going to China to immerse myself in its culture, and search for some sort of life-changing experience. Basically, I wanted to get as far away from Dublin and Trinity as humanly and financially possible: by the second half of third year my course, with all its reading lists (not to mention the lovely new semesterised way of doing things) was causing me anxiety crises at increasingly regular intervals. I envisioned Tibet at sunset and striding alongside the Great Wall.

So naturally, when the woman I childmind for responded, “Would you not do an internship instead?” I reconsidered her sanity and parenting skills. Why would a fulltime student want to work – for free! – during the summer? Three months later I was on a flight to DC, with an internship lined up at the National Democratic Institute (NDI).

I’d be lying if I said I don’t know what convinced me to sacrifice my appetite for Asia for a desk in the seventh floor intern room at NDI. And it wasn’t just finding out that NDI pays their interns. The prospect of working at an internationally respected and globally relevant organisation won me over. That, and how impressive it would look on my CV.

Having scouted for internships in Ireland and establishing that they are non-existent, I turned stateside to the Land of Opportunity. I realised that location and networking were factors just as important as the company and job itself. Where better than the Mecca of politics and law, and what better than a non-governmental think-tank?

I was delighted when NDI offered me a place on the Political Parties team. I’m not a Political Science student, and I was scared they expected me to know things like the entirety of Obama’s healthcare reform, or the key parties within every major political system worldwide. To my pleasant surprise my first week consisted mainly of orientation.

After orienting myself about anything related to NDI and its offices in 65 countries, I enjoyed Staff Appreciation Day. This annual event consisted of a 20-minute ceremony honouring staff that had stuck around for more than five years, followed by food, drinks and new friendly new faces. I had struck gold.

Under the wing of my lovely, young supervisor, I quickly learnt the importance of networking, and began to understand internships as a unique networking strategy. Why else would the wealthy parents of White House hopefuls encourage their Ivy League kids to act as pooper-scooper to the President’s dog? Getting to know the other interns in my office, who were mostly college seniors like myself, I found out that they had all interned at approximately five other organisations like NDI.

Coming from an educational background that is virtually ignorant of the internship concept, I was shocked to find out that most respected companies and Masters programs required students to have completed at least one professional internship, in a field relevant to their education and career aspiration.

The tasks I was given throughout my two-month internship at NDI engaged the research skills I had acquired throughout my time as an English and History student. Finally I can stand up to those who worryingly ask me “Yes, but, what are you going to do with your course?” From writing reports about Youth representation in political parties, to compiling case studies on Political Academies, I happily read through IDEA publications, online articles, and books in the NDI library: I was getting paid to do the kind of research that I did at Trinity. Getting paid to write essays – now there’s an idea.

Apart from the routine tasks I was given, we were encouraged to attend various events both within NDI and at various institutes throughout DC. I attended functions like a talk in the Institute of Peace by Kosovan politician Veton Suroi after the ruling of the International Court of Justice on Kosovo’s declaration of independence. The internship opened my eyes to the practical application of skills I’d been learning throughout my course, and broadened my knowledge about current affairs and global politics.

I would encourage any student to consider the internship experience, and I’m not just talking politics in DC. For those considering a Masters or a PhD in the States, internships would seriously boost their chances; and for those having a mid-degree crisis, it’s a great way to discover the relevance and importance of your course-taught qualifications.

By Iseult McLister

The first diamond auction in Zimbabwe since the ban enforced by the Kimberly Process was lifted, took place on 11 August. The Kimberly Process was set up as a joint government, industry and civil society initiative to stem the flow of African conflict diamonds. Many conflict diamonds came from the Marange fields where the Zimbabwean army forced out tens of thousands small-scale miners in 2008, and began forcing villagers, some as young as ten, to work as slaves under the threat of death and violence.

These human rights abuses led to the global suspension of the sale of Zimbabwean diamonds through the initiative. Private jets delivered buyers from India, Israel, Russia, Lebanon and the US amid tight security at Harare international airport to the auction in August, just six days after Naomi Campbell testified during his war crimes trial at The Hague that she had received blood diamonds from Charles Taylor, former president of Liberia.

So what’s the point of diamonds? Diamonds have two applications: industry and pleasure. The monetary value of industrial and gemstone diamonds vary greatly. Industrial diamonds need to be hard as they are used for cutting. Most industrial diamonds are synthetic and are produced in a lab, as opposed to diamonds mined from the Earth.

These industrial diamonds, both natural and synthetic, have an intrinsic usefulness value and provide a service. Natural diamonds are only preferable to synthetic diamonds when they are cost effective, that is, cheaper. Gemstone diamonds are valued for clarity and colour and are used in jewellery, and a store of value for the exchange of goods and services. In recent years it has been possible to produce gem-quality synthetic diamonds of significant size.

It seems that the market for diamonds is supported by societal pressure, ritual and myth. Their worth devalues the lives of the people who mine them, a colonial inheritance of ethnic inequality. This theft of natural resources gives rise to the notion that the West’s imperial ambition still holds strong on naturally rich Africa.

The arachaic use of the electoral college in US politics has to be replaced by a popular vote for real democracy, argues Conor Dempsey.

As the Democrats attempt to pass a bill to reform healthcare the spotlight is fixed on the Senate; the second house of congress is blocking a health bill backed by a majority in both houses, as well as by the President. In that house the Democrats have 57 members out of 100 and the Republicans have 41, with 2 Independents. The fact that a party with a majority of 16% is not able to pass an important bill is just one symptom of the malfunctioning United States democracy. Equally indicative of rot in the system is the grossly unfair way in which Presidents are elected, as well as a new ruling allowing corporations to fund political campaigns to any degree they wish.
The Senate rule which allows a mere 41 senators to block any bill backed by the other 59 is the filibuster. A filibuster used to be a rare event witnessed on occasion as a last ditch effort to prevent a law, which somebody had particularly strong feelings about, being passed. It used to involve an unusually long speech designed to cease the debate and stop the functioning of the house; if a filibuster went on long enough it would often result in the abandonment of a bill.
The record for the longest filibuster ever conducted in the US Senate was set by Strom Thurmond (R), who held the floor for 24 hours and 18 minutes in an unsuccessful attempt to derail the 1957 Civil Rights Bill. This sort of display of determination is probably in keeping with the intentions of the the framers of the Constitution; they hoped that the Senate would act as a cooling chamber for particularly sensitive bills. The idea was that the Senate would slow down the passage of a bill and that broader concensus would have to be reached in order to pass bills of special import. The bill did pass in the end, and was followed up with a stronger Civil Rights Bill in 1965. The southern segregationists had their last show of determination, as was their right, but democracy won in the end. Nowadays Sen. Thurmond would have a much easier task ahead of him for reasons I will explain.
One hundred years ago, in order to minimise the potentially unlimited power of the filibuster, the Senate decided to introduce the rule of cloture. This put an end to the right on which the filibuster rested, namely the right to unlimited debate. Now, if two-thirds of voting Senators voted in favor, cloture could be called to a debate and a filibuster ended. In 1975 the Senate made a further two changes; it was these changes that took the filibuster beyond the realm of cooling and into the domain of the undemocratic. It was decided that a filibuster could now be announced by 41 senators without any need to actually hold the floor; the filibuster became a simple action with no physical effort involved. It was also decided that three-fifths of the Senate membership (60 Senators) would have to vote for cloture.
Since then there has been an exponential rise in the use of the filibuster. Its ease of use has meant it has become routine. Only 41 Senators are needed to block any bill; the 41 Senators representing the smallest states account for 11% of the population. The 60 Senators representing the 30 smallest states account for 24% of the population.
Senators representing a mere 11% of the population are in theory able to block any bill voted for by senators representing the remaining 89%. Senators representing only 24% of the population can pass any bill. Surely even the most staunch supporters of the sacrosanct document that is the US Constitution can recognise that this is not democratic?
Another sign that US democracy is malfunctioning is the current state of their electoral system. In the US presidential election there is a significant risk of a presidential candidate losing an election despite having had a clear majority in the popular vote. This actually happened in 2000 when Gore had 500,000 votes more than Bush, but because of the archaic electoral college system Bush won the election. The problems with this system are many, and the arguments of its defenders are void. The electoral college is defended as a part of the American political culture, as part of the Constitution, intrinsic to the way politics in the US is supposed to operate. This sort of argument is usually presented as stemming from pride in the Constitution and faith in the wisdom of the framers. There is not, however, any mention of the electoral college in the Constitution.
As Hendrick Hertzberg noted in an essay for The New Yorker, “America has been an inspiration to people struggling for democracy. But, when it comes to actually designing the machinery, the American model has no takers – not among successful democracies at any rate. (The Philippines, Liberia, and some Latin-American countries, which have copied us, are not good advertisements)”.
There is hope that American presidential elections will begin to look more like those in other democratic countries come 2012. This is thanks to a pragmatic new program called the NPV, or National Popular Vote plan. The idea is this: states sign up to an agreement, to be enshrined in their state legislation, stating that once enough states have come on board to account for 270 electoral college votes – the number required to elect a president – then the said states will cast all their votes to whichever candidate wins a majority of the national popular vote. So far about one-fifth of the required 270 votes have been accounted for. This system introduces a popular vote without having to amend the constitution, which is an ideal but unrealistic option.
Unfortunately a recent Supreme Court ruling made a historic change to the law that deals fresh damage to the American political system. The court ruled by a divided 5-4 vote that corporations are now free to use treasury funds to back any political candidate they wish. This decision reverses the ruling of Austin vs. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, 1990. The vote rests on the interpretation of the word “person” in the 14th Amendment. The interpretation now includes corporations in some essential ways – the most important being that as far as persons have the right to aid political candidates privately under the 1st Amendment, corporations are now persons. This is an unfortunate decision for a system already plagued by the influence of money.
A question that perhaps the rest of the democratic world ought to ask: is America in a legitimate position to advance the cause of democracy worldwide? Of course, flawed democracy is usually better than no democracy, but as the leading nation of the world America ought to be an example of democracy at its best. It is only fuel for the enemies of democracy that the chief democratic crusaders seem a little shaky in their convictions.
Suppose the US did elect its president based on the percentage of the national popular vote that he received. Al Gore would have been the president from 2000 until 2004, at least. The “war on terror” would have been quite different. There is little doubt that Gore would have invaded Afghanistan; he would have been right to, or so most commentators agreed then and still agree now. He would not, though, have been so quick to believe spook stories about weapons of mass destruction hidden in Iraq; as the Iraq war reaches its seventh anniversary we should reflect on the profound way a broken American democracy can affect the rest of the world.

After hundreds were slaughtered there in January, army presence was stepped up heavily in Jos, the capital city of Plateau State, in north-central Nigeria. The security forces, however, were nowhere near the outlying village cluster of Dagan-Na-Hauwa when, over four long hours, hundreds were hacked to death on the morning of Sunday, 7th March. Jos has been the scene of mass violence in 2001, 2008, and now twice this year. The multi-ethnic former colonial mining city lies on Nigeria’s roughly Northern-Southern, Muslim-Christian divide, and the sporadic killings have been put down to ongoing feuds between the heavily segregated religious communities of Jos. The facts, however, do not fit so simple an explanation, and these periodic murderous riots and rampages are in fact a disturbing manifestation of some of Nigeria’s deepest-rooted problems, both cultural and systemic.
On 17th January, protests at the building of a mosque in a Christian area of Jos sparked off four days’ intense fighting. Mobs set aflame mosques, churches and over a thousand houses, shops and vehicles. Of the 492 who were burned, hacked or shot to death, 364 were Muslims. Among them were all 150 inhabitants of one Muslim village. Less than two months later, at 4am on 7th March, machete-wielding gangs descended on the Christian and Animist Berom community of Dagan-Na-Hauwa. They set fire to homes, used fishnets and animal traps to catch fleeing villagers and killed between 100 and 500 people. This recent slaughter has been seen as a reprisal by Muslim Hausa-Fulani herdsmen for January’s violence, but the tribe’s expansionist agenda and aggressive protection of their grazing rights have been mentioned as possible motivations. In reality, though, these two motivations are examples of the same kind of inter-ethnic power struggles which have fuelled violence in the area, and indeed throughout the country, for decades.
Tribal and village loyalties come before nationality for most Nigerians – a policeman might conspicuously fail to notice crimes committed by a kinsman, or a civil servant might promote someone from his own village over someone more qualified. While this is in no way true in most cases, it has generally been a problem in Nigeria that collective, community-based thought and action is invested not in Federal or even State government, but in tribe and village. At best, this is nothing more sinister than friendly parochial-style rivalry, but at worst it manifests itself in mass murder. Nigerian nationhood is tenuous; “Nigeria” as a word and as an entity being a more or less arbitrary creation of British imperial officials. The many groups living in this vast, rich swathe of land were ruled under imperialism as one, fought for independence as one, and have been ruled as one by military governments or a tiny political élite ever since. A complete lack of common language, identity, religion or perceived interests have stunted any effort to make a united nation of this geographical expression and have fuelled the kind of violence that has plagued Jos.
In such a context we can understand, when we consider that the Muslim Hausa-Fulani are Nigeria’s largest ethnic group, making up 30% of the population, why accusations of complicity in the recent massacres have been directed at people in high public offices. Plateau State’s governor, Jonah Jong, a Christian, was informed of the likelihood of violence as early as 9am on Saturday 6th. He passed word on to security chiefs, who failed to respond until 2.30pm on Sunday 7th – when the murderers had long since escaped after a massacre lasting four hours. The National Security Advisor has been replaced, security forces are clamping down heavily on the area and dozens of arrests and charges have been made, but more boots on the ground in and around Jos will not uproot the causes of the violence.
Protests of crowds of women in Jos and Lagos on 12th March illustrated the ethnically divided nature of Nigerian politics, as they demanded that the Northern Muslim oligarchy end their encouragement of the aggressive expansion of the Hausa-Fulani around Jos. The Hausa-Fulani are seen as “settlers” and “invaders” in Jos, despite a presence going back decades. However, they have done little to encourage integration, clustering away from the locals while expanding, often violently, outside this zone. Like the Igbo and the Yoruba, Nigeria’s other major tribes, they speak a language unintelligible to others. With rapid urbanisation as the 20th century drew to a close, such strong cultural differences became a catalyst for violence in many Nigerian cities, and today in Jos the Hausa-Fulani are expanding their power. Because “settlers” are treated as effective second-class citizens by local and state government, the Hausa-Fulani must rely on high tribal connections in the Federal establishment. These powerful Muslims identify with the Hausa-Fulani as kinsmen on a national level, and at the local level of Jos religion is an easy visual and cultural symbol for tribal affiliations. The killings therefore are a national, and not a local or a religious issue, and one which poses tough questions to Nigeria’s tribal-based politics and society.
The Most Rev. Dr. B. A. Kwashi, Anglican Archbishop of Nigeria stated, following the recent massacre, that: “In Jos we are coming face to face in a confrontation with Satan and the powers of hell.” This could easily be mistaken for part of an extreme anti-Islamic rant, but the Archbishop’s statement on the violence was more pertinent than that. He insists that religion is being used as a justification for a quest for money and power by mobs of unemployed, demoralised, hopeless young men. He believes that they are young men with no religion, no values whatsoever, made so by the hopelessness of their environment. Professor Kibiru Mata of the University of Abuja agrees. The government of Plateau State and the Federal government alike, he says, have failed to appropriate public resources in such a way as to alleviate suffering. He calls the killings “a manifestation of economic alienation”, the actions of a generation with no opportunities.
To understand why and how the Jos massacres happened, we should examine the economic realities of Nigeria today. Though the country is abundant in natural resources and production, is potentially self-sufficient and has a huge and young working population, most of its citizens live in poverty and squalor. Of the nation’s 154 million inhabitants, and of the hundreds of thousands who apply for third-level education, only 35-40,000 are accommodated in the country’s universities. 31% of Nigerians are completely illiterate. Hundreds of billions of dollars are owned by a tiny number of Nigerians and business-savvy foreigners for purposes of speculation and short-term profit, making the material basis for real progress impossible by squandering or looting the country’s potential wealth. The continuing deregulation of the oil sector is taking even more of the country’s natural wealth out of the hands of its citizens.
In this context, it is little surprise that some of the country’s tens of millions who are permanently unemployed, and the many more who are on precarious livelihoods, might resort to violence to defend what they see as their tribe’s interests, and by extension their own. The segregated and tense nature of society explains why such a small élite can seize and hold so much of the nation’s wealth with so little outcry. Struggle between rival groups, made up of the powerless and penniless, for political and economic advantage is seen as the only means of advancement. Since community consciousness goes no further than tribe or village, class-consciousness is practically nonexistent. Rival ethnic groups, victims of the same inequality, fight for the scarce resources left to them, encouraged and often given impunity by wealthier and more powerful members of their tribe. This is a battle fought at the cost of lives, most graphically illustrated by the rioting, violence and massacres that have periodically broken out in places like Jos.   
Dozens of suspects have been arrested by the time of writing, some with blood still staining their clothes. Charges have been made against many, heads in authority have metaphorically rolled and security forces are bolstering their presence around Jos. It must be recognised, however, that the occurrence of such hideous atrocities must be a sign of massive systemic and cultural problems. A suppression of the symptoms, assuming even that is achieved, will not address the root problems of inequality, disenchantment and militant ethnic division that have once more brought death and destruction to Jos.