Even You, My Sweden

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Even You, My Sweden

Wednesday, Aug 31, 2005

By: America Vera-Zavala

In Sweden lately the news has reported on another friendship; President Chavez comradeship with Fidel Castro. Meanwhile no news has reported on President Bush's friendship with Pat Robertson. In Sweden, there will be a conference on democracy 28th-30th August. It will be held in the national parliament and it is closed to the public. Understanding today's obstacles to democracy is the theme for the 7th world meeting of democracy promoting foundations, and it is organised by the Swedish parliamentary foundations and International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA). The Swedish Government will participate.

In that conference a panel named Supporting regime change - democratic support or intervention is on the programme. The first programme had both Carl Gershman, president of well-known National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and Eva Golinger, US citizen, lawyer and author of the book The Chavez code, cracking U.S. intervention in Venezuela. In that book she shows how the Bush administration finances and participates in the campaign to overthrow Venezuela's elected president Hugo Chavez. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) plays an important role in this campaign as the U.S. government financed organ for what they say is promoting democracy in the world.

Now Eva Golinger has been removed from the programme. She received a letter, saying that she at this late stage no longer fitted into the programme, when she was already on. Reasons for removing her have been that she is democratically dubious, as she has said condescending things about NEDs president. According to, of course, unofficial sources it was the NED that conditioned their participation upon her removal. The organisers´ intervention implies that there will be no critical or alternative voice on that panel; no one that could argue that supporting regime change might actually be intervention, rather than democracy building.

To call a democratically elected president 'a strong armed dictator' as Pat Robertson did is quite extreme. The US government usually claims that Venezuela has problems with democracy. In Sweden the bourgeois political parties call Chavez an anti-democrat. (They sometimes call the Swedish Government anti-democratic as well; democratic one-party-state is a concept the Swedish People's party use.) What makes the conference in Sweden different is that the Swedish Government will participate in the conference. The social democratic government is thereby sanctioning a rather dubious action: to remove a critical voice from a panel in a conference about democracy.

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1539