Learn to relate to draw lessons

A. Gaffar Peang-Meth

via CAAI News Media

By A. Gaffar Peang-Meth

April 14, 2010

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Homes Jr. said, "The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts alive."

We can store a lot of data in our brain and yet the data alone do not equal "knowledge." Unless we relate what we know to other things, other people or other events to create interconnection, information is just data.

In comparative studies, we learn about others and their ways in order to better understand our own. Most will agree that this is a pathway to building a better world.

When the world's nations joined together in 1948 in a general assembly on the heels of World War II to proclaim the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they noted, "disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind," and affirmed "it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law."

Many have read this preamble, but may fail to relate it to the human drive to be free and empowered with certain civil rights, and to be willing to "rebel" to achieve those.

Spanish-born American philosopher George Santayana wrote: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Last Wednesday evening, a day of bloody clashes left 68 people dead and more than 400 wounded in Bishkek, the capital of the Kyrgyz Republic in Central Asia. President Kurmanbek Bakijev, a U.S. ally, fled Bishkek as former foreign minister Roza Otunbayeva, head of the coalition of opposition groups, declared on state television: "Power is now in the hands of the people's government. ... You can call this revolution. You can call this a people's revolt. Either way, it is our way of saying that we want justice and democracy."

Otunbayeva received a congratulatory telephone call the following day from Russia's Vladimir Putin, who never wanted the U.S. Manas Air Base, crucial to the U.S. war in Afghanistan, on Kyrgyz soil.

Kyrgyzstan, which is slightly smaller than South Dakota with some 5.5 million people, won independence from the former Soviet Union a day before the latter collapsed in 1991.

Kyrgyzstan's "falsified" March 2005 parliamentary elections unleashed the Tulip Revolution that removed President Askar Akayev from power in April 2005 as protesters stormed government buildings. The new government, under Bakijev, was formed by opposition leaders, but with leaders allegedly linked to organized crime, rights and justice were far from reach.

Alexey Semyonov, of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation that promotes civil society and democratic development in the former Soviet Union, and Professor Baktybek Abdrisaev, former Kyrgyz ambassador to the U.S. and Canada, said, "It is significant that of the former Soviet Republics, Kyrgyzstan is the only nation that has forced regime change."

They wrote in the April 9 Washington Post: "The people are clearly willing to fight for their rights."

They assert that the week's events provide "a powerful lesson" for Obama: "The U.S. government's policy of supporting security at the expense of democracy has come back to bite the United States. For the past several years, the United States has been noticeably quiet while the Bakijev regime has held rigged elections, trampled on human rights, and resorted to violence to silence the opposition and independent media."

The U.S. should help "the opposition deal with the considerable economic and political challenges facing Kyrgyzstan," they said.

"Governments change, but problems often remain," they wrote. "The new Kyrgyz leadership has a chance to address the country's pressing problems, and the United States could improve its Kyrgyz policy in the process."

Events like last week's riots in Kyrgyzstan are similar to events elsewhere, such as Myanmar and Cambodia -- hence, we can relate similar events and situations, learn lessons and unlearn old ones.

On April 7, in Hanoi, where Association of Southeast Asian Nations leaders gathered for their annual summit, 105 parliamentarians from Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore petitioned ASEAN to "immediately enact strict and targeted economic sanctions" against Myanmar. They want to "immediately" suspend Myanmar from ASEAN, with Myanmar's "permanent expulsion earnestly considered," for violating the ASEAN Charter's principles and promulgating election laws that excluded the only real opposition leader, Aun San Suu Kyi, from participating.

On March 29, the Suu Kyi-led National League for Democracy announced its boycott of the May 10 elections.

In its report "Vote to Nowhere," Human Rights Watch sees the Burmese elections as "being carried out in an environment of severe restrictions on access to information, repressive media restrictions, an almost total ban on freedom of expression, assembly, and association, and the continuing widespread detention of political activists."

Foreign Policy Magazine's "Happy Birthday to Burma's Military: It's been a hell of an awful 65 years," posits that "A free and fair election would most likely give (Myanmar's military) its marching orders: out of power."

We should know, learn to relate and draw lessons from similar but unrelated events occurring all around us.

A. Gaffar Peang-Meth, Ph.D., is retired from the University of Guam, where he taught political science for 13 years. Write him at peangmeth@yahoo.com .