At my first meeting with Saddam, within 30 seconds, he knew two things about me
cnn.com
cnn.com
> At my first meeting with Saddam, within 30 seconds, he knew two things about me. I told him my name was George Piro and that I was in charge, and he immediately said, “You’re Lebanese.” I told him my parents were Lebanese, and then he said, “You’re Christian.” I asked him if that was a problem, and he said absolutely not. He loved the Lebanese people. Lebanese people loved him. And I was like, “Well, great. We’re going to get along wonderfully.” (Saddam was a Sunni Muslim, while most Iraqis are Shia Muslims.)
But it's also true that without strong rulers like them, their countries collapse into complete disorder. You can't impose democracy on them because they've never had democratic traditions or the institutions to perpetuate them.
It's not as much as having democratic traditions - it's simply that these countries are composed of a bunch of tribes, and such tribes have no intent of working with each other - the majority would crush the rest and have no problem about it.
Please try not to paint everyone with your own colonial-era assumptions.
The only way I know is that the when people join to kill the governors every time they decide to go around killing the governed, some democratic institutions appear.
Yet, this is not how most democracies were created. It was how the concept appeared, but nowadays it tends to take a different route. Some murky, hard to follow route that looks exactly like noise to me.
India is a good example. Way before independence in 1947, there were parties and organizations engaged in the political process, often with internal democracies. This facilitated the shift to democratic traditions even post-independence. And while it's not perfect, India does have a strong democracy today with hundreds of parties, largely fair elections, and robust electoral participation.
Contrast this with a country like Sri Lanka that did not have the same engaged political class pre-independence and you can see how proper democracy never really thrived there post-independence.
> “Now, when I go past that statue, I feel pain and shame,” said Kadhim al-Jabouri in 2016. “I ask myself”: Why did I topple that statue?” He regretted the fall of Saddam’s regime. What came after, in his opinion, was a disaster: “Saddam has gone, but in his place we now have one thousand Saddams.” Kadhim even wanted the statue back. “I’d like to put it back up, to rebuild it,” he said. “But I’m afraid I’d be killed.”
Yes, everything.