Apr 14, 2011

Parliamentary Forum Takes Shape

Who is better placed to support democracy advocates than freely-elected parliamentarians?  David Lowe reports from Brussels on this week’s meeting of the Parliamentary Forum, a significant new actor in the field.

“The Arab Spring has had a remarkable resonance here in Europe.” The speaker at a private luncheon in the European Parliament (EP) in Brussels was Dirk Toonstra, who runs the assembly’s Office for the Promotion of Parliamentary Democracy.

The office was hosting a meeting later that afternoon of the Parliamentary Forum, an association of current and former parliamentarians who advocate for democratic reform around the world. Created last spring under the auspices of the intergovernmental Community of Democracies, the forum lends the support and solidarity of its prestigious membership to the causes of both emerging democracies and small-d democrats struggling to gain a foothold in repressive states.

Such solidarity was very much on display at the meeting when the EP’s President Jerzy Buzek (right), a veteran of the Solidarity movement that led the transition to democracy in Poland, promised the support of the Parliament to the democracy movements in the Middle East and North Africa, from where he had recently returned.

“As in Eastern Europe in ’89, parliamentary democracy and democratic accountability will not happen all at once,” he remarked. “Real change comes from the bottom up.”

Although change can’t be produced from the outside, he added, “I could feel how much people wanted to know that we are with them.”

President Buzek was affectionately dubbed the “white-haired gentleman in Tahrir Square” by Egyptian demonstrators, said Ahmed Samih, Director of the Andalus Institute for Tolerance and Non-Violence Studies (left), a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy, who travelled from Cairo as the parliamentarians’ invited guest.

Many of the forum’s parliamentarians expressed strong support for democrats in the Arab world, including its Chairman, Emanuelis Zingeris, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee in Lithuania’s Parliament; long-time democracy advocate Edward McMillan-Scott, the European Parliament’s Vice President for Democracy and Human Rights; and German MEP Elmar Brock, Group Coordinator on Foreign Affairs for the European People’s Party.  Brock recalled his involvement as a young Christian Democratic Party activist in assisting democratic transitions in Portugal and Spain in the mid-1970s and how that cause brought him together in common purpose with German colleagues across the political party divide.

The star of this gathering was the young Egyptian activist Samih, whose clarity of analysis gripped the attention of his influential audience. A lot has been made of the fact, he said, that the revolution was brought about by young people.  And although this is certainly the case, the real generation gap that has to be bridged is not so much based upon age but also upon awareness and understanding about the world around us.

“The average Egyptian needs to understand that freedom is not scary,” he said. He warned against “putting everything in one game” such as an election, noting that “there will be many steps along the way.”

Farag said that he and his colleagues welcome help from the West, and was impressed by what he has heard from influential westerners such as Buzek about their desire to be supportive.

“You want to help us not because of your energy needs but because you truly believe in what we are trying to achieve,” he said.

But “the revolution will not last,” he cautioned, if economic development does not accompany political change. The region needs a Marshall Plan to ensure that any democratic gains are consolidated.

Apart from discussing how the Forum can respond effectively to the situation in the Middle East, the other principal purpose of the gathering was to begin to build the Forum’s infrastructure, a project to which the NED and its affiliated party institutes, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute (IRI) have lent their support.

In addressing the forum, NED President Carl Gershman noted the importance of ensuring that it welcomes into its membership and leadership structure as diverse a set of democratically-elected parliamentarians committed to its mission—both geographically and politically–as possible. Noting that an ongoing affiliation with the Community of Democracies will be critical to the forum’s success, it should stand as an independent network with its own governing structure that can develop multiple relationships with governmental, nongovernmental, and inter-governmental bodies that advocate for democracy and human rights.

“It will be incumbent on this body to play a leading role in protecting people on the front lines of the democratic struggle,” Gershman added. “Who better to equip civil society in nondemocratic countries with the political support they need than members of Parliament who derive their authority directly from the people who have elected them?”

Just how much potential the Forum has to effect positive change was dramatized toward the meeting’s conclusion, when Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a recently retired member of the U.S. House of Representatives and a founding member of the Forum, read a statement from newly-freed Cuban political prisoner Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet (right).  Dr. Biscet wanted the assembled to know how important it was for him to hear in prison that the very first resolution passed by the Forum at its convening meeting in Vilnius in March 2010 was in support of Cuba’s pro-democracy movement.

He paid tribute to President Buzek and the European Parliament for imposing economic pressure on Cuba’s dictatorship, asserting that “the solidarity we received was decisive in saving my life” and stressed the importance of continuing “strong, constant measures of solidarity” on behalf of the Cuban people.

The Forum is scheduled to unveil its new governing structure at its upcoming meeting in Vilnius on June 30th during the biennial gathering of the Community of Democracies.