Comment: Toothless Civil Society
11 Jul 2010, 10:57 AM
Salim Waheed
When a people’s liberties are suspended whenever there is an emergency, there is a word for that: dictatorship. There is a line between democracy and dictatorship – and over the course of the last week we came dangerously close to stepping over it.
Not necessarily because of the President’s actions, the incarcerations, or the now common place parliamentary upheaval, but because those who should have spoken out remained silent.
Yes, you in the civil society need to raise your voices. Raise your voices to demand explanations, protest abuses, and safeguard the right to criticise a sitting government.
Instead of raised voices, however, we have only heard silence. And this started from the moment this affair began. The President’s office holds a press conference where the entire cabinet resigns, the President asserts his supreme authority to find justice, and what does the media say? Do they question the legitimacy of the action? Do they ask what this will mean for the peace in this nation? Or even whether the government expects demonstrations in retaliation and how the President (now the only civilian authority over the police and army) will respond?
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