By Zia Mian

In 2002, the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy of the United States famously declared that there was now “a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.” Around the world, and at home, this claim finds ever fewer takers. It is not hard to see why.

In the past few years, the United States has launched a systematic assault on freedom, abroad and at home, as part of the war on terror. The United States has invaded and now occupies by force not one but two countries. This was once considered to be the highest crime under international law. The United States now sees it as legitimate to kidnap, imprison without charge or trial, torture and murder people around the world.

A new Pew Center poll finds that since 2002 favorable views of the United States are lower in 26 of 33 countries for which there is data. The impression of American support for freedom and democracy in particular seems to have withered. Pew reports that majorities of people in 43 out of the 47 countries they studied now believe that the United States promotes democracy mostly where it serves its interests.

The world and Americans themselves see that American democracy is in trouble at home. The president and vice president consider themselves and act as if they are above the law. Congress has failed to act as a check. Even with a majority in Congress now held by the Democratic Party, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue. The prison camp at Guantanamo is still open. The courts have largely been silent as basic civil liberties have been violated. The US government has secretly and without warrant collected the phone records of millions of Americans. Surveys show that only about a third of Americans now believe “most elected officials care what people like me think.”

The Economics of Rich and Poor
International polling also finds that U.S. policies are widely seen as increasing the gap between rich nations and poor nations. Pew finds that in 32 out of 47 countries, more than half the people surveyed believed that the United States widens the divide between rich and poor. The poll finds widespread negative attitudes, in 22 out of 47 countries, toward American ways of doing business. There is particular dislike of the American model both in the wealthy societies of Western Europe and Canada, and in Latin America, which has suffered from U.S. economic policies for many decades.

The sense that U.S. economic policies are a problem is another area where international opinion and U.S. opinion are largely in accord. Polls showed in 2003 that almost 75% of Americans believed that the gap in incomes between rich and poor was larger than it had been 20 years before, and a majority thought this to be a “bad thing.” A March 2007 poll by the Pew Center found 73% of Americans believe that “today it’s really true that the rich just get richer while the poor get poorer.” Earlier this year, even President Bush admitted for the first time that “income inequality is real -- it's been rising for more than 25 years.”

The data suggests these judgments are well-founded. The wealthiest 10% of American households had almost half of the nation's total income while 90% of families shared the other half. But even within the rich there is marked inequality. The top 1% of households had about half of the income of the top 10%, and the top 0.1% of households actually received nearly half of the share going of the top 1%.

The rise in inequality seems to be picking up pace. In 2002, the top 1% of U.S. households owned just over 50% of corporate wealth. In 2003, they owned almost 60%. And, they are getting wealthier. From 2003 to 2004, the real average income for the top 1% of households grew by almost 17%. For the remaining 99%, the average gain was less than 3 percent. The top 1% made over one-third of all income gains in 2004, even more than they did in the year before. All of the income gains in 2005 went to the top 10% of households, while the bottom 90% saw their income decline. The top 1% held a bigger share of total income than at any time since 1929.

The gap between the richest and the rest has become even more dramatic since. As The New York Times pointed out recently, 25 American financial hedge-fund managers each made over $240 million in 2006 for a total of almost $6 billion. The highest earner among them made $1.7 billion last year. For comparison, half of all American families had an income of less than $44,000 in 2006.

The hedge-fund managers may be the new financial hyper-elite in terms of income but more typical corporate bosses have also done very well. A study of executive pay found that the median executive salary at 350 large public companies was $6.8 million in 2005 (that is to say half of these executives earned more than this).

Workers have not done so well. The Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy track the gap between bosses and workers. The current gap in annual incomes is 411-to-1. This compares with a gap of 107-to-1 in 1990. In 1980, the gap was only 42-to-1. The pace has clearly quickened from one decade to the next.

It is no surprise then that polls find two-thirds of Americans now believe corporations make too much profit. Three-quarters see corporations as too powerful and almost 60% view them as concerned more with profit rather than the public interest.

American Dream or Illusion

Despite these widespread feelings about the economy, 60% of Americans support the statement that “I’m pretty well satisfied with the way things are going for me financially,” according to the March 2007 Pew poll. More than 70% of Americans believe that “the strength of this country today is mostly based on the success of American business.” Over half of Americans think the United States should be promoting American business practices around the world.

How are we to understand these contradictions? At heart may be the illusion of the American dream. A 2005 poll found that 40% of Americans believe that the chance of upward class mobility had risen during the last 30 years, and another 35% said it had not changed. Only about 20% understood that class mobility has declined in each of the past three decades. In fact, fewer American families moved up the income ladder during the 1990s than the 1980s, which in turn saw less upward movement than the 1970s.

As inequality at home worsens, what will Americans do about the withering of the American dream? To hang on to what they have and try to get what they can, no matter what it takes, will mean opposing immigration reform, supporting corporations, and wanting their government to sustain the global empire that brings some benefits in the form of cheap goods, cheap energy, especially oil, and services. There are many politicians in both Democratic and Republican parties who are willing to offer this path: their only real disagreement may be how much force to use to sustain the American way of life.

With American policies for managing global and national politics, society and economy in crisis at home and abroad, there is a desperate need to create alternatives that encompass all of these challenges. It is time to think about the world after the American Century.



Zia Mian is a physicist with the Program on Science and Global Security at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and a frequent contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus (online at www.fpif.org).

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By Rufus Fears

We live in a moment that is as critical for freedom as the American Revolution, the American Civil War, or the days following Pearl Harbor. In each of those moments, America moved the cause of freedom forward. In the Revolution, we declared our independence from the greatest empire of the day, fought for and won that independence, and then went on to establish a constitution that still gives us liberty under law more than two hundred years later. In the Civil War, we removed the great moral wrong of slavery. After Pearl Harbor, we shouldered the burden of World War II and the subsequent Cold War.

Sept. 11 represents a time just as critical in the history of the freedom. As we judge the generations of the American Revolution, the Civil War, or Pearl Harbor by their heroic response, so we shall be judged. We are engaged in what I believe is a noble crusade to bring freedom to the world. But that crusade is faltering now, in part because we have failed to ask some very fundamental questions.

This essay is intended to ask the most fundamental of those questions: Is freedom a universal human value, which all people in all times and places desire?

History of Freedom
Our foreign policy since the time of Woodrow Wilson has been based in the belief that freedom is a universal value, one that is wanted by all people in all times. But why, if freedom is a universal value, has the history of the world been one of tyranny, misery, and oppression?

Socrates taught that our first task in any discussion is to define our terms. Thus, the starting point here is identifying what we mean by freedom. We never disagree, Socrates tells us, about empirical questions; it is about values that we disagree. No value is more charged with meaning than that of freedom.

If we carefully examine the ideal and reality of freedom throughout the ages, we come to the conclusion that what we call “freedom” is, in fact, an ideal that consists of three component ideals: (1) national freedom; (2) political freedom; and (3) individual freedom.

National freedom is freedom from foreign control. This is the most basic concept of freedom. It is the desire of a nation, ethnic group, or a tribe to rule itself. It is national self-determination.

Political freedom is the freedom to vote, hold office, and pass laws. It is the ideal of “consent of the governed.”

Individual freedom is a complex of values. In its most basic form individual freedom is the freedom to live as you choose as long as you harm no one else, Each nation, each epoch in history, perhaps each individual, may define this ideal of individual freedom in different terms. In its noblest of expressions, individual freedom is enshrined in our Bill of Rights. It is freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, economic freedom, and freedom to choose your life style.

In the United States, we tend to assume that these three ideals of freedom always go together. That is wrong. History proves that these three component ideals of freedom in no way must be mutually inclusive.

You can have national freedom without political or individual freedom; Iraq under Saddam Hussein and North Korea are examples. In fact, this national freedom, this desire for independence, is the most basic of all human freedoms. It has frequently been the justification for some of the most terrible tyrannies in history: Nazi Germany had national freedom but denied individual and political freedom in the name of this national freedom.

It is quite possible to have political and national freedom but not individual freedom. Ancient Sparta had national and political freedom, but none of the individual freedoms we expect today.

The Roman Empire represents two centuries that brought peace and prosperity to the world by extinguishing national and political freedom, but in which individual freedom flourished as it never had.

From the Declaration of Independence to the First World War, the history of our own country provides a dramatic example of the separation of these three component ideals of freedom. After 1776, the United States had national freedom. Adult white males also had political and individual freedom. White women had a considerable degree of individual freedom but no political liberty until 1920 and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Until after the Civil War, African-Americans possessed neither political nor individual freedom. In 1857 the Supreme Court formally ruled that African-Americans did not have the right to individual or political freedom. The soldiers of the Confederacy fought valiantly for their political, individual, and national freedom while defending their right to deny individual and political liberty to a considerable proportion of their population.

Thus, clearly, throughout history, these three components ideals of freedom have not been mutually inclusive.

Had we learned this lesson of history, Americans might have avoided crucial mistakes in our recent foreign policy in the Middle East.

History demonstrates that one of the most basic human feelings is the desire for national freedom. You may hate your government, but if someone invades you, you may very well fight in defense of your country. Napoleon learned this in Spain. History should have taught us to be skeptical of the claim that we would be welcomed as liberators in Iraq.

A second lesson of history we should have pondered is that freedom is not a universal value. Great civilizations have risen and fallen without any clear concept of freedom. Egypt—,the civilization that built the pyramids, that created astronomy and medicine, did not even have a word for freedom. Everything was under the power of the pharaoh, who waso have the security of a well regulated economy under a king. Time and again throughout history people have chosen the perceived benefits of security over the awesome responsibilities of freedom.

In fact, it can be argued that the Middle East, from the time of the pyramids down until today, has had no real concept of freedom.

Russia from the time of Rurik, the first Viking chieftain of Russia in the ninth century, down to Vladimir Putin, has never developed clear ideas of political and individual freedom. Thus we should not have been surprised when the Russian Revolution led not to freedom but to Stalin and one of the bloodiest despotisms in history.

China has no tradition of political or individual freedom. The noble teachings of Confucius are all about order, not freedom.

In fact, the very beginning of civilizations in the Middle East around 3000 BCE and in China around 1700 BCE represented the choice of security over freedom. Civilization began with the decision to give up any freedom in order to have the security of a well regulated economy under a king. Time and again throughout history people have chosen the perceived benefits of security over the awesome responsibilities of freedom.

History thus teaches that freedom is not a universal value. Our Founders knew and acted upon the lessons of history. The Founders, unlike us, thought historically. They used the lessons of the past to make decisions in the present and to plan for the future. They understood that tyranny and the lust for power, not freedom, is the great motivating force of human action and of history. But the Founders also believed that the United States could chart a unique course in history

Our country does have a unique legacy of freedom. That is both a cause for hope and a caution as to whether our unique ideals of freedom can be transplanted to the rest of the world. For in the U.S. we have achieved a unique balance of national, political, and individual freedom.

We have never been conquered; we simply cannot imagine what it would be to be under the rule of a foreigner. Our experience is very different from that of France, for example, or Germany.

We take political freedom for granted. We have regular elections no matter what the circumstances. In 1864, in the midst of the greatest war in our history, we held elections. The Europeans wondered after 9/11 what would happen to America; we went ahead with another election. In a way it is a good thing we are so secure in this freedom that we take it for granted. With that comes our deep love of the Constitution. Of course, Americans may not know what is in the Constitution, but they know it is good and resent any effort to tamper with it.

As to individual freedom, where could one have so much of it, including the basic freedom to create a better life for yourself and your children? People clamor to get into America, because individual freedom opens up a whole new world.

So how did we come to this unique legacy of freedom? Again, history is our guide. Our American legacy of freedom is the product of a unique confluence of five historical currents.

First, there is the legacy of the Old Testament, the idea that we are a nation chosen by God to bear the ark of the liberties to the world. Our Founders believed that deeply. Abraham Lincoln believed it deeply. Franklin Roosevelt believed it.

The second current comes from classical Greece and Rome. The legacy of Greece and Rome is the very basic one of self-government, consent of the governed. The kings of Babylon were chosen by God, Saul was chosen by God. The pharaoh was God on earth. But in Greece and Rome, men said “We are free to govern ourselves under laws that we give ourselves.”

Thirdly, Christianity took the idea of Natural Law from Greece and Rome and turned it into the belief that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The freedom that for the Greeks and Romans had been limited to the citizens of Athens or Rome now became a universal proclamation under Christianity.

Fourthly, England gave us the notion that government is under the law, no matter how powerful that government is. In the Watergate hearings, Sen. Herman Talmadge (D-Ga.) quoted the old saying that “the wind and rain might enter the cottage of a poor Englishman, but the king in all his majesty may not.” The law governs the king himself, and our Cohe law. So the frontier in Russia becomes the home of the gulag. Latin America has the tradition of Christianity and the Old Testament, and of Greece and Rome, and of the frontier. But Spain lacked the powerful English concept that government is under the law. Thus Latin America, despite its industrious and intelligent population and its natural resources, has never developed a stable basis for political and individual freedom.

Fifthly, there is the contribution of the frontier. From the very beginning, America has been about the frontier. It is what led men and women to Jamestown and Plymouth. The frontier was the vast, seemingly endless land stretching before us. The frontier meant equality of opportunity. Even the best ideals of Greece or Rome or England could never flourish, because they were always cramped. But here there was land and the ability to start over again. This mattered more than all the ancient hatreds and class frictions that had existed under the old world. We cannot understand why Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats speak the same language but kill each other. Their hatreds have been festering for centuries, but here they pass away. That has been the unique gift of the frontier.

The existence of these elements in other nations and civilizations only underscores the uniqueness of the American experience of freedom. Russia has the tradition of Greece and Rome, Christianity, the tradition of the Old Testament; and it has a frontier. But it lacks that English sense of government under the law. So the frontier in Russia becomes the home of the gulag. Latin America has the tradition of Christianity and the Old Testament, and of Greece and Rome, and of the frontier. But Spain lacked the powerful English concept that government is under the law. Thus Latin America, despite its industrious and intelligent population and its natural resources, has never developed a stable basis for political and individual freedom.

Our heritage of freedom has been forged in war and hardship as well as in prosperity. Our national independence was proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. Name another nation in history founded on principles. An Italian or German will say you are an Italian or German because you speak Italian or German. Traditionally, you were born an Englishman; you were geographical accident. But in America we have said from the start that everyone can come here from wherever they wish. They can speak whatever language is their mother tongue and practice whatever religion they want. They become an American by adopting our principles.

The principles proclaimed in 1776 are the noblest of all principles: we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with the unalienable right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The proclamation of these ideals in the Declaration of Independence is based on the belief in absolute right and absolute wros and all times. And they believed that governments are instituted among men to achieve those goals. That is the purpose of government. And if a government does not fulfill those goals, you have not only the right but the duty to overthrow it.

The absolute truths of the Declaration of Independence are founded on a belief in God. God appears four times in the Declaration of Independence: “Nature’s God,” the “Creator,” “Supreme Judge of the world,” “Divine Providence.”

Thus our national freedom is founded on absolute truth and upon a belief in God./p>

As the Declaration of Independence is the charter of our national freedom, so the Constitution is our charter of political freedom.

When that constitution was brought fourth in Philadelphia, we were thirteen straggling republics along the eastern seaboard. If Benjamin Franklin or George Washington wanted to go somewhere, they went in the same way Cicero or Caesar did: they walked, rode, or sailed. If they wanted to communicate, they did it the same way Caesar or Cicero did. George Washington received inferior medical care to what a Roman gladiator got in the first century CE. And yet that same constitution gives us liberty under law and prosperity in a world of technology that Benjamin Franklin could not even have imagined and when we are superpower of the world. We should never take this extraordinary achievement for granted.

The American people in their wisdom would not ratify this constitution without the promise of a bill of rights. It seems to us extraordinary today that the first Congress kept its promise; and in short order set down and produced the Bill of Rights, which still guarantees these fundamental freedoms of individual liberty.

But there was still slavery, written into the Constitution. God is not mentioned once in the Constitution, but slavery was made the law of the land. To remove that wrong of slavery we fought the bloodiest war in our history, in which 623,026 Americans died. It produced men of great honor and integrity on both sides. It was finally resolved at Gettysburg.

When Abraham Lincoln went to Gettysburg to redefine our mission, he started with the Declaration of Independence. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” It was unique because it was dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. In one sentence he told Americans why they were fighting the war, to see whether any nation so conceived and dedicated could long endure. In all the rhetoric we had about Vietnam and all that we have heard about Iraq, we have not been told so simply why we were at war.

Lincoln then went on to state that this civil war was a challenge laid upon this nation by God. The more Lincoln grappled with why this terrible war had come, the more convinced he had become that it was sent by God to punish us for the fundamental wrong of slavery. He told Americans that we must resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain and that this nation under God should have a new birth of freedom. And that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.

So this war that had cost so many lives was resolved in a way that no other nation would have. The Confederates simply pledged their word not to take up arms and to go home. The reconciliation began. I think that too is unique in history.

With the Civil War we see the growth of democracy, the move towards extending the franchise to women, 18 year olds. They all become part of this political freedom.

This nation has continued in a unique course of freedom. In World War II we fought and won the war in the name of democratic freedom. We could have withdrawn the way we did after World War I. But we recognized that isolationism had been a mistake. So we shouldered the burden of the Cold War.

Now we have been called again, and the question is, will we find the leadership to tell us why this great challenge is there? Will we find the will to resolve this struggle? Will we find the understanding among ourselves to see the great task that, as Lincoln said, is still before us?

I speak to you not only the legacy of America, but of destiny. I believe that no people in history have ever been more magnanimous, generous, courageous, willing to forgive and forget, and willing to help the world than have the Americans. So after World War II, we raised Germany and Japan up. This remains our greatest foreign policy triumph. We took those two nations that had no long tradition of freedom and made them into viable, prosperous democracies.

Today, because of the United States, more people throughout the world live in freedom than any time in history. If we are willing to accept the challenge, it may yet be our destiny to change the course of history and to establish freedom as a universal value.

J. Rufus Fears is the David Ross Boyd Professor of Classics at the University of Oklahoma, where he holds the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Freedom. He is the David and Ann Brown Distinguished Fellow for Freedom Enhancement of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs. This essay is based on his presentation at Living Without Freedom: A History Insitute for Teachers sponsored by FPRI’s Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education, May 5-6, 2007, held at and co-sponsored by the National Constitution Center and the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia. FPRI’s History Institute program is chaired by David Eisenhower and Walter A. McDougall and receives core support from the Annenberg Foundation. The program on Living without Freedom was supported by a grant from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Originally published at FPRI.
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By Sudeshna Sarkar

On 11 January 2004, Om Prakash Timilsina was arrested by the then-Royal Nepalese Army on suspicion of having links to Maoist rebels and held in an army barracks for five months.

During this time, the Maoist insurgency against Nepal's government was growing stronger, with the army being called in to fight the guerrillas. The midnight knock at Timilsina's door was indicative of what had been the way of life in the Himalayan nation since 2001.

What followed that midnight knock was a session of torture that Timilsina, and others like him, will never forget.

"A major put me down on the floor and wrapped wires round my wrists," Timilsina told Advocacy Forum Nepal (AFN), a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that monitors detention centers and provides legal aid to victims of human rights abuse. "Then in an interval of three minutes, he gave me three shocks. [Then] he beat me with a wooden stick. After that, he sat on my back, sipping tea."

Timilsina's ordeal occurred at a time Nepal was being indirectly ruled by King Gyanendra. The monarch had ascended the throne in 2001 after a midnight massacre in the palace in the capital city Kathmandu wiped out his elder brother, King Birendra, and the entire royal family. In a move that signaled that he did not want to remain a mere figurehead, Gyanendra sacked the prime minister in October 2002 and began appointing a succession of premiers to consolidate his power.

In February 2005, having decided to rule directly, the king seized power with the help of the army and ran the government for 15 months before an uprising forced him to step down in April 2006.

The 19-day revolt is regarded as a landmark in Nepal's history, ending the king's authoritarian rule and restoring democracy. The new multi-party government signed a peace agreement with the Maoist guerrillas, who ended their 10-year "People's War" and finally joined the ruling alliance this year.

Though the civil war has ended, the practice of torture by security forces and the Maoists continues in Nepal.

Last week, AFN released a report based on its findings in the 35 detention centers it monitored from April 2006, when the royal government fell, to April of this year. "Torture Continues: A Brief Report on the Practice of Torture in Nepal," documents over 1,300 new cases of torture since the restoration of democracy.

"[...]One year after the historic Jana Andolan [people's movement], Nepal still suffers from an enormous deficit in human rights protection," the report said. "Torture still continues, the culture of impunity reigns and victims continue to suffer from the mental and physical wounds of egregious human rights violations and abuses."

Common methods of torture include administering electric shocks, sexual abuse and savage beatings with iron rods and bamboo sticks.

The report noted the June 2006 case of Sikha Ram Chaudhary, who was detained by Chitwan National Park officials in southern Nepal. Chaudhary was suspected of stealing rhino horns.

According to the report, Chaudhary was subjected to severe beatings and burns with cigarette butts for a week before falling unconscious. He was taken to a nearby hospital where he was declared dead. The autopsy report showed that he had seven broken ribs, which had caused his respiratory system to collapse.

Of the close to 4,000 detainees interviewed by the NGO, nearly 28 percent said they had been subjected to torture. The worst perpetrators were the police, who were responsible for over 1,200 out of just over 1,300 cases of torture. Though the sweeping power enjoyed by the army to execute arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial executions officially ended in April 2006, the report documented 17 cases of torture, four rapes and six cases of illegal detention by the troops.

Even the Maoist guerrillas who pledged to give up violence were responsible for 67 cases of torture, one case of rape and 96 cases of abduction. Minors received the worst treatment, with close to 37 percent saying they had been tortured and around 43 percent reporting that they had been detained illegally.

The tip of the torture iceberg

The findings could be just the tip of the iceberg. Given that AFN monitors detention centers in only 13 out of 75 districts and these include only police cells and not army detention centers, the actual figure could be substantially higher.

"In the remote areas especially, detention centers are often out of bounds for human rights monitors," said Dr Bhogendra Sharma, president of Kathmandu-based NGO Center for Victims of Torture, which provides medical and psychological treatment to torture victims.

"For instance, we were not allowed access to detainees in Nawalparasi [the site of ethnic violence in the southern plains since January]," Sharma told ISN Security Watch. "Old habits die hard. For torture to end, the culture of impunity has to end first.

Activists point to two prominent torture cases for which national and international organizations are campaigning for justice: the Maina Sunuwar case and the Bhairavnath battalion case.

In February 2004, 15-year-old Maina Sunuwar was taken from her home by a group of plain-clothed soldiers who originally wanted to intimidate Maina's mother who had witnessed the gang rape and murder of her niece by security forces. As neither of Maina's parents were home at the time, the soldiers took the girl to an army training center where she was given electric shocks until she died.

According to AFN, after her death, the three perpetrators shot her in the back of the head to make it look like she was killed while trying to escape and buried her body.

The NGO helped Maina's mother file a case against the soldiers, which was also taken up by Amnesty International and several foreign diplomats, including the US ambassador to Nepal, James Francis Moriarty.

The ensuing publicity forced the army to conduct a court martial. However, the three men were found guilty only of "not following procedures," Two captains were ordered to pay NRS 25,000 each (approximately US$395) as compensation and were declared ineligible for promotion for one year. The colonel involved was fined NRS 50,000 and made ineligible for promotion for two years.

Authorities exhumed Maina's body in March, but there has been no investigation. Though the Supreme Court ordered the army and police in May to explain the delay and produce the original case files, no documents have been submitted.

In the second case, the Bhairavnath battalion of the army ran a secret torture camp in its barracks in the heart of Kathmandu. Maoist suspects were held for long periods while blindfolded and their hands tied behind their backs. At least 49 of the prisoners are missing. The Maoists say they were gunned down on the outskirts of the city and then buried secretly.

Redefining torture

Though the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights last year compiled a report with graphic description of the torture methods and names of prisoners and asked the government to punish the men running the camp, no action has been taken.

"The criminal justice system has to be overhauled," Chandra Kanta Poudel, IT and administrative manager at AFN told ISN Security Watch. "Though there is a Torture Compensation Act, it is not enough. Torture has to be made a criminal offense."

The Torture Compensation Act provides for a maximum compensation payment of NRS 100,000. To make a claim, a victim has to file within 35 days of being tortured or released from detention, often a near impossible task given the geographical barriers and lack of legal remedies. Most importantly, it regards only an act of violence occurring during official detention as torture.

"We are lobbying for a new torture law," says Sharma. "Also, we are asking the government to sign and ratify the Optional Protocol of the Convention Against Torture, that would allow national as well as international organizations to monitor torture in Nepal."

Nepal's Law and Justice Ministry says a new torture law is in the offing.

"The government has abolished torture," Kedar Poudel, a ministry spokesperson, told ISN Security Watch. "The state doesn't condone torture. The acts reported are committed by individuals and the government asks victims to use the legal remedy available. Security officials found guilty of torture will be punished."

According to Poudel, the Law and Justice Ministry and the Home Ministry are drafting a new bill to be tabled in parliament. "It will re-define torture," he says, "and make it a criminal offense. We have been told to give it high priority."

Another top priority for the government is holding elections in November, but it first has to quell the growing violence in the southern plains, where nearly 90 people have died since January. The elections have already been postponed once; it remains to be seen if they will now be held on 22 November as scheduled.

Until this exercise is conducted with some semblance of credibility, a new government installed and a new constitution written and promulgated, the new torture law is unlikely to see the light of day.


Sudeshna Sarkar is a correspondent for ISN Security Watch in Kathmandu.


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By Edward Friedman

It’s not easy for American students to know what it means to live without freedom. They know all the bad things about their own country—Virginia Tech, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the Enron and Halliburton scandals, the LA riots, elections stolen, federal attorneys fired for pursuing criminals rather than a political agenda, etc. How democratic is America?, they cynically wonder. When you tell them how awful these other places are, they ask, aren’t you just whitewashing your own society.

The hardest place to understand what the lack of freedom means is China, which is nothing like the Stalin model or Cuba or North Korea. It’s by no stretch of the imagination a totalitarian society. In post-Mao China, Chinese travel abroad in huge numbers. The country has the fifth largest tourist population in the world, on its way to being number one. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students are abroad; in internet use, China is about to overtake the U.S. as number one in the world. It’s a market society, brutally competitive; the economy is less state-owned than France or Austria’s, for example. Life is not dominated by communist block units; you can buy your own house or car, there’s no forced labor. You can choose your physician freely; most young Chinese would say they live in a free, democratic society.

So what does it mean to say that Chinese people live without freedom? First, it is a brilliant system at making people complicit with the unfreedom. For days after the June 4, 1989, massacre in Beijing of democracy supporters headquartered in Tiananmen Square, there was great tension in the city between people who live there and the occupying army. How did the party respond? Teachers were ordered to teach their students a new song: “The Army loves the people, the people love the Army.” Parents couldn’t say the song was untrue lest their children repeat this back at school. You can’t bring up your children the way you want to.

This is true for many lies the Chinese are forced to let stand uncontested. There still are committees for the defense of the revolution. They have to make their own money and often turn into Avon ladies, visiting house to house, but you know that if you aren’t complicit, maybe you won’t get a passport. It may be held against your child when s/he applies for college. You and your family will be shunned in the neighborhood. You could be committed to a psychiatric hospital.

China is not the worst stable authoritarian regime in the world: a North Korean might consider it free. Even foreigners who go to North Korea and then come back to China feel they are returning to a free country. But you get faced every day with decisions that bring it home to you that you’re not. If your child is ill, should you go to the pharmacy and buy some medicine? Of course, but medicines are often frauds in China. There have been cases where baby formula is bogus and children have died from receiving no nutrition. China has a ruthless free market, no regulation, no safety standards, no FDA, no CDC, no NIH. It’s also the world leader for people dying in industrial accidents, and about 400,000 each year die from drinking the water, which is unpotable. A Chinese journalist recently went to 10 Chinese hospitals wanting to get his blood tested. So he complained of certain aches and pains that he knew would cause them to test his blood. But he didn’t give them his blood, he carried in a thermos with tea and poured that into the cups. Eight of the ten reported to him that he had the most serious blood disease and that it would cost them endless money for treatment.

China has people who see the problems of this corrupt, arbitrary society and try to do something about them. There are courageous lawyers and journalists. The leading political crime in China is land seizures. The economy is growing at a fantastic rate, which means that you can sell pieces of land to a developer for a lot of money. You don’t want ordinary people to get rich. All the goodies are grabbed as much as possible by the ruling group. Over 97 percent of all millionaires in China are relatives of the top party elite. There are those who complain and resist, who stick to their guns. Lawyers come in to defend them. Accordingly, China is first in the world in the number of lawyers, journalists and Netizens in prison.

These things are hard to see when one is visiting, but there are signs one can see if one looks hard. Go to the railroad station at midnight, and you will see tens of thousands of people sleeping in the street. It is probably the most unequal stable society in the world. Income in the poorest rural areas has been declining. There’s no union, with one exception: the government is now promoting getting unions into multinational corporations, but as an instrument of party control, not to help the workers. The Party doesn’t like foreigners doing things they don’t know about. They want their agents in the places where the foreigners are, to control things as much as they can.

Freedom means the ability to hold your government accountable. There is no way to do this in China, and people die. China is said to have 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world, and some would say it would be 20 out of 20 if they didn’t lie about the other four. Everything is corrupt. The only way you can get anything done is through corruption. This creates a sense of no morality. But people want meaning in their lives. So there’s a tremendous religious revival. All over China, all religions are reviving. The Party fears it. How does it respond? It crushes Christian house churches, it doesn’t like Lama Buddhism, it’s careful about Hui Muslims, but beyond that, it’s pushing essentially its own state religion, a combination of Han chauvinism, in which Chinese worship the yellow emperor, and an authoritarian Confucianism. The state is building Confucian temples. The vision is that China is going to explain its extraordinary rise to its own people and to the world as the result of its unique ethical religion, its Confucianism. It’s going to spread Confucian societies all around the world, it’s going to teach everybody that China produces a better quality of people because it has this moral authority and all others are inferior. Confucianism is the only way to raise people, and the world is properly hierarchically ordered with Confucian Chinese at the center of it.

China is a superpower. Its economy is rising, its military is rising, and Chinese people in surveys are more popular in most countries of the world than are Americans right now. China’s going to be using this money to serve certain purposes. Among them are undercutting the power of the United States, democracy and human rights and supporting authoritarian regimes. Whether it’s Sudan or Nigeria, they can buy up the oil and governments don’t have to listen to any kind of international pressure about conforming to human rights. China has already defeated the international human rights regime.

China’s rise means that freedom is in trouble. The era we’re in is very much like the era after WWI. Authoritarian models are rising and are becoming more attractive. I can imagine a future in which unregulated hedge funds lead to an international financial crisis and this is seen as coming out of the Anglo-American countries, London and New York being the two centers of these monies. But China regulates capital, so these things are not allowed in. The Chinese model may yet look even more attractive than it does now.

In describing this Chinese rise and how I believe it has the potential of being a threat to freedom in an extraordinary way that we haven’t seen since the end of WWI, I am not trying to suggest that Chinese don’t care about freedom; people do not need a Greek-Roman Christian heritage to care about freedom. That kind of claim is parochially and culturally very narrow. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its beautiful preamble, is a Mencian document (Mencius is one of Confucius’ disciples). The word “individual” never appears in the document. The language was shaped by the philosophy of Mencius because one of the crafters of the Universal Declaration was a Chinese gentleman named P.C. Chang. Of course this is December 1948, the day after the Genocide convention was passed. The communists didn’t come to power for another year.

There is no trouble in understanding freedom and human rights in any culture in the world. People living in tyrannies may in fact have a better understanding of what freedom is about than American teens, who think it’s just that you get your driver’s license in your late teens. The Chinese regime has fostered a nationalism to trump democracy. People are taught that they are threatened by democracy, that democracy would make people weak. Party propaganda has it, “How did Rwanda occur? Because they tried to build a democracy. If the Hutus had simply imposed their will, they never would have had that problem. If it moves in a democratic direction, China is going to fall apart; it will be like what happened to Russia, to Yugoslavia. Do you want to end up like Chechnya and Bosnia? That’s what the Americans really want. You are fortunate to be a Chinese living in an ethical, authoritarian system.” The TV will show pictures of say the Los Angeles riots, the Sudan, and people are made frightened and confused. They’re proud to be Chinese and want to raise ethical kids. They want a country they can be proud of, certainly not like American kids. The Chinese are taught that American youth are smoking at an early age, use pot, have babies in their teens, watch pornography on TV, spread AIDS, get divorced, and don’t care what happens to their elderly parents. Why would you want to live in such an immoral way? This propaganda seems to work with many Chinese.

So what is growing in China is an authoritarian, patriotic, racially defined, Confucian Chinese project which is going to be a formidable challenge not just to the United States but, I think, to democracy, freedom, and human rights all around the world. China is going to seem quite attractive to many people. That is why it is so very important to understand what living without freedom really means.

Edward Friedman is professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.This essay is based on his presentation at Living Without Freedom: A History Institute for Teachers sponsored by FPRI’s Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education, May 5–6, 2007, held at and co-sponsored by the National Constitution Center and the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia. FPRI’s History Institute for Teachers program is chaired by David Eisenhower and Walter A. McDougall and receives core support from the Annenberg Foundation; this program was supported by a grant from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.



This article was orginally published at FPRI

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