Can someone explain to me why Fidel Castro has been succeeded by his brother? Since when does communism equal hereditary monarchy? Ask Kim Jong-il. It’s instructive to contrast Cuba with Pakistan, where a lot of people are trying under very difficult circumstances to manage a legitimate transfer of political power. It is, unfortunately, far too late to do it peacefully this time. But if they can get the legitimacy right, the violence should subside. I wish Pakistan some of the luck we already had over many centuries.

Sorry, make that millennia. I am regarded in some circles as eccentric because on mild provocation I start explaining about King Alfred and the cakes, and how the descendants of Edmund Ironside married into first the Scottish then the post-Conquest English royal families. But that history is of compelling interest not only for its often ghastly details but because, in the end, the slaughter stopped. Britain basically solved the problem of political legitimacy, and passed that solution on to Anglosphere countries like Canada. Few others have been so fortunate.

The orderly transfers of power we enjoy, which tragically elude so much of the world, are a revealing test of such legitimacy. All rulers assert some sort of claim not just to hold but to deserve power, whether as sun god incarnate, vanguard of the proletariat or person whose budget measures command majority support in an elected legislature. But while the latter is easy to test, tyrants are obliged to maintain the illusion of consent through fear.

It usually works pretty well, at least for them, in the normal course of events. But when the leader is dead or dying and no potential heir emits visible light or the sound of history’s marching feet, when no one yet controls the machinery of repression, it invites swordplay in the temple or machine-gun fire in the cabinet room.

Passing on power to one’s relatives is a kind of desperate default position under such circumstances. That blood is thicker than water tends to make all sorts of families cling together in times of chaos. Besides, a political tyrant is liable also to be a domestic one, and expect his relatives to remain under his thumb from beyond the grave. As they well may; when a legacy of brutal injustice is your only claim to power, the slightest hint of scruples invites violent overthrow. If Fidel Castro’s claim to power was illegitimate, Raul’s is ludicrous. Thus while undemocratic regimes formally based on heredity tend to depart from that principle in times of crisis, more advanced tyrannies have the paradoxical opposite tendency, to revert to it, from Cromwell’s son to Mao’s widow to Saddam Hussein’s family.

Even in fragile democracies effective political power is often dynastic, from India to Kenya; if nothing else, when your political allies are also your relatives you have a good idea where trouble will come from. Of course mature democracies also have families in which political interest and talent run strongly. But you don’t see Robert Kennedy becoming president when JFK is assassinated. And even the British crown became reliably hereditary only once compliance with the will of Parliament replaced accident of birth as the measure of legitimacy.

It is not coincidence that no sane individual has the slightest expectation that Britain or North America will witness a violent transfer of power. Take the bitterly disputed 2000 American election: Did one person even get punched in the nose? And how likely is a coup in Ontario?

In public affairs, as in life generally, we should remember to count our blessings. I yield to no one when it comes to discontent with the inadequacies of governance in Canada. But I am so irascible on this point because I worry that we hold the precious gift of ordered liberty in too slight regard when, indeed, we bother to regard it at all.

The cultural habits of self-government, the ability to depend on your fellows to share your outrage at the right things in the right way at the right time in sufficient numbers, are hard-won and precious and it is no mere pedantry to recall how it happened. Nor is it culturally insensitive to balance sympathy for people seeking peaceful transitions of power outside the Anglosphere with a realistic appraisal of the enormous difficulties they face.

A statue of Alfred the Great on Parliament Hill would remind us that many good people died, often horribly, to give us decent government. And it would help us spare a thought for those people in Pakistan struggling against long odds to achieve what we inherited, and those in Cuba and North Korea still denied even the chance to try.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

With everyone off in Bali dealing with the urgent menace of global warming or panting over Karlheinz Schreiber’s semi-revelations, might I interest you in some malaria?

No thanks? Lacks glamour? OK, malaria doesn’t hand you $100,000 in cash and not ask for a receipt. It doesn’t excite Hollywood celebrities or in a pinch make you one. But it is the No. 1 killer of children in Africa. Plus I found something new and encouraging to say about it in an unexpected venue: a Senlis Council press conference on Afghanistan.

I confess to going in with vague suspicions that the council were among the usual suspects on foreign policy. They seemed to be calling the Afghan mission a disaster and most people who do so are engaged in wishful thinking like, of course, most of those calling it a success.

One of the weird and wearying things about issues like Iraq or Afghanistan is the way people’s assessment of what is happening so often reflects what they wish was happening. Like the Wednesday New York Times headline, “A Calmer Iraq: Fragile, and Possibly Fleeting.” Who knew they’d say that?

I started reading the Senlis handouts about Afghanistan unravelling and the Taliban taking over and I’m thinking “Yeah, yeah.” And then suddenly they’re demanding that NATO double its expeditionary force and the Euro-slackers send more troops into the dangerous south and into parts of Pakistan. Then Senlis warned that setting a timetable for Canadian withdrawal was a recipe for another Rwanda or Srebernica.

I already knew the Senlis Council thought paying Afghan farmers to cultivate poppies for medical purposes instead of heroin is far better than U.S.-backed crop eradication that alienates Afghans without staunching the flow of illegal drugs. And I suppose ideas make strange bedfellows because I already agreed. But I was pleasantly surprised when council president Norine MacDonald told the press conference CIDA was doing such a wretched job of delivering aid in southern Afghanistan that the Canadian Forces should take over.

When questioned later about the impression it would create if we militarized aid, she said it would create the impression starving people were getting food and she wasn’t going to heed “theological” objections from the “aid and development community” who didn’t have a better plan or any plan at all. Cool. She also reminded us how horribly the Taliban treated women last time. Are you listening, Mr. Dion and Mr. Layton?

Then she handed the microphone to Amir Attaran, Canada Research Chair in Law, Population Health and Global Development Policy at the University of Ottawa, to discuss the link between Afghanistan and fighting malaria. Yes, he’s also the guy in a dispute with DND over treatment of Afghan prisoners and Access to Information. Which again made me skeptical because while I dislike government secrecy, I’m not inclined to fuss unduly about the fate of irregular combatants in hideous guerrilla wars, nor to reproach the Afghan government for the quality of its paperwork when it can’t even pay its police.

Anyway, the good professor turned out to be a malaria enthusiast. Uh, let me rephrase that. He’s a passionately committed expert who wants the “international community” to do more about malaria.

There is no “international community” (fortunately) but let me recommend the rest of his plan. I had somehow acquired the impression malaria was manageable, not curable, that retired Indian army majors tended to start shaking every few months for the rest of their lives and downing quinine cocktails (a.k.a. gin and tonic) to suppress symptoms. It turns out one type of malaria does recur but not the lethal Plasmodium falciparum variety ravaging Africa. And that one, falciparum, is curable. Dr. Attaran says a simple course of pills, usually for three days for about a dollar, does the trick.

Here’s the punch-line: The medicine he advocates (Artemisinin Combination Therapy or ACT) is in short supply but is principally derived from a hardy plant called Artemisia, or “sweet wormwood,” easy to grow in Afghanistan. So his idea is to raise charitable funds to pay Afghan farmers to grow sweet wormwood, pay other Afghans to extract the key ingredient, then donate it to the World Health Organization to process into medicine.

I don’t think this idea, alone or combined with the medical poppy plan, would completely stop the flow of illegal drug money to the Taliban. But it would contribute to the success of the Afghan mission while saving hundreds of thousands of lives a year cheaply.

When the muckamucks get back from their Bali yak-fest and finish shovelling their snow maybe they should look into it. Or we could just go ahead without them.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Hey. I finally found a public policy problem I can solve. Let’s tell Miloon Kothari to buzz off.

Not high on your list? Perhaps you missed the Tuesday Citizen story that after a quick tour of Canada this month, this international man of meddling pronounced himself “disturbed” by the lack of adequate housing in Canada. As opposed to where he’s from, namely India?

Mr. Kothari is the UN Human Rights Council special rapporteur on adequate housing. Which pretty much lets you guess what he’d say about housing in an advanced western democracy after a whirlwind tour talking to the usual advocates and activists. He’d say it isn’t up to international standards because we have a wretched exploitive market economy. And he did.

What I want to know is why the official reaction wasn’t “Ah shaddap!” Canada is a wealthy democratic country with lively debate on public policy and megabillion dollar social programs to solve every imaginable crisis including some we made up ourselves. If we haven’t solved the housing problem it’s not because some nit failed to do a fly-by and recommend socialism.

Mr. Kothari even had the gall to accuse us of not obeying international law, specifically the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. OK, we did sign it. So let’s withdraw from it, pronto. Where did we ever get the idea that a superior method of creating fundamental law was an international body full of supercilious bureaucrats, scaly dictators and failed states instead of a parliament full of people we elected?

Does anyone out there honestly suppose we’ll give better attention to social issues because some representative of a body composed of nations like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Gabon tells us we don’t measure up to their high standards? Tell me: What’s the housing situation in Gabon?

The funny thing is, there are people who suppose exactly that. Mr. Kothari’s verdict was greeted with predictable enthusiasm by the Ottawa-based Alliance to End Homelessness. But it also prompted a spokesperson for Human Resources and Social Development Minister Monte Solberg to say the minister will review the recommendations, and whine that federal spending on housing is at an all-time high. CTV gave Mr. Kothari favourable coverage half-way through his tour and suggested that one in 100 Canadians are homeless. And when he was done the federal NDP aboriginal affairs critic chimed in that regrettably the Tories do indeed favour a market-based approach to housing. Uh, except on aboriginal reserves. Where the housing situation is, um, yes well …

When we’re handing Mr. Koothari his hat I suggest he make his next stop China, where the government has displaced over a million people to flood the reservoir behind the wobbly, environmentally disastrous Three Gorges Dam and plans to remove four million more. Lovely house. A bit damp, though. Is having running water in your house a right? What if it extends dozens of meters above your roof?

China is not just an egregious human rights violator. It is also, of course, a member of the UN Human Rights Council. So what’s the UN doing about repression there, including deliberately erasing the culture of Tibet? Sort that one out and a few other things like Darfur then get back to us about housing in Edmonton.

If Canada has a homeless problem it’s because homelessness is complicated, not because some high-falutin’ bureaucrat from the other side of the world didn’t drop in to hector us about bad economics. As for Mr. Kothari telling us to use a national housing strategy instead of markets, isn’t India, after wasted decades of Soviet-style planning, finally enjoying real economic growth because its government decided to let markets work?

Oh, and how’s everything in Mali? Also a member of the Human Rights Council. Would you like to try to explain why Mali is sending someone to criticize housing in Canada? Or why we let them? Of course in one sense these bureaucrats aren’t from Mali, Bangladesh or Djibouti (also HRC members) but from an international jet set elite, accountable to no one and contemptuous of ordinary people. But that doesn’t answer the key question. What on Earth prompts us to accept lectures from such people?

Obviously Mr. Kothari’s report is mostly harmless in the sense that it won’t produce anything besides headlines. But it’s discouraging that it doesn’t prompt bracing, common-sense, pro-democratic statements of contempt for him and the organization he flew in on.

There’s one problem I can solve. Shoo.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]