Anatol Lieven em entrevista ao Ivan Nunes a ao Pedro Oliveira

Well, I suppose… I think that perhaps in Europe I would have written a softer book on that, but there is this deadening conformism in which you’re expected continually to pay tribute to. It does tend to suppress debate. The other thing is, I’ve lived in very rough parts of the world, as a journalist, and I do find this whole idea that a world community of NGOs can somehow substitute the state deeply foolish. When you get an absence of the state, and NGOs try to run the show, what you get is Somalia. It doesn’t work. NGOs don’t have armies, they don’t have police forces, all they end up by doing is hiring warlord militias to protect them, so, in a sense, they perpetuate and subsidize anarchy. But it’s not their fault. If they’re there to distribute food, or distribute education, they need protection. The alternative would be to allow George Soros to get together with a number of other people and hire themselves a mercenary army, a division of gurkhas, and send them into Congo or Somalia. Sometimes there seems to be a detachment of certain basic political realities, which is not to say that their long-term goals aren’t good. Of course they’re good, I support them, they’re desirable ends of Humanity. But, if you’re honest, things do require trade-offs. You know what police forces are like in much of the world, including in democracies. Look at the Brazilian police: Lula da Silva’s government tried to crack down on police corruption and extortion and it seems that what happened was that the police concerned decided to send a small message to the government not to do this kind of things. So they killed 30 homeless people in a shelter one day. But, at the same time, when we go to Brazil, we don’t want the police just to vanish, and equally we have to think very seriously on how hard to crack down on police corruption and extortion. I talked to a senior police officer in Pakistan, who said: «look, if the government here really tried to get the police to obey the rules, you know what would happen? The police would do nothing.» «They don’t really do much anyway», he said (he was pretty drunk at the time), «but if you’d really crack down on them, they would do nothing, and then what would happen to this society?»

There are realist trade-offs in this world, which is not to say that things cannot be changed. But you have to consider the fact that, except for a period of about a year, India has been a democracy since 1947, and yet in India the police behaves with absolutely bestial cruelty to anybody suspected of crime who doesn’t have political or criminal protection. And that says something about the fact that, leaving aside the connection between democracy and economic development, even the connection between democracy and human rights is more ambiguous than people think. I’m no advocate for the Chinese police, but, if I were a poor person, I’d rather be arrested by the Chinese police than by the Indian police, despite the fact that China is a dictatorship and India a democracy, because the Chinese police is a bit more under control. This isn’t of course true if you’re a political dissident, in which case I’d much rather be arrested by the Indian police. As long, of course, as one’s not an armed dissident: in that case, the Indian police will torture or kill you as well.