When Beijing was awarded this year's Summer Olympics, some of us
imagined that the quadrennial pageant would induce China to liberalize.
You might as well hope that Michael Phelps would give up swimming to
become a shot putter. Among the government's actions leading up to the
games, charged Human Rights Watch, were "massive forced evictions, a
surge in the arrest, detention and harassment of critics, repeated
violations of media freedom and increased political repression."
China
won the battle for gold, capturing 51 first-place medals. It earned a
less cherished honor when human rights activist Hu Jia, sentenced in
April to 3 1/2 years for "incitment to subvert state power," was
awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought by the European
Parliament.
The Soviet Union, which made Andrei Sakharov famous
as a political dissident, is no more, but Vladimir Putin keeps it alive
in spirit. As required by the constitution, he stepped down as
president at the end of his second term, but without ceding a sliver of
power. Putin not only installed a protege as president, but became
prime minister, an office that suddenly exhibited a power and
importance that had gone unnoticed.
The former Soviet republic
of Georgia had a presidential election of its own—"the first election
where no one was 100 percent sure whether they were going to win or
not," as one Georgian analyst marveled. The winner, Mikheil
Saakashvili, should have had no such uncertainty about the outcome of
the August war with Russia that he rashly helped to provoke.
Democracy also in a recession
A rather depressing run down of countries that don't quite fit the vision Americans have held of the world for the past few decades.