52 International The EconomistOctober 17th 2020
2 document suggesting that the true number
of cases in a single day in September was 19
times the official tally.
Egypt’s government says it is coping ad-
mirably with the pandemic. A dozen doc-
tors have been arrested for suggesting oth-
erwise, as have several journalists. One,
Mohamed Monir, died of covid-19 contract-
ed during detention.
Of the 24 countries that had national
elections scheduled between January and
August, nine were disrupted by the pan-
demic. Some delays were justified. But as
South Korea showed, a ballot can be held
safely if suitable precautions are taken.
Some other governments were in no hurry.
Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa
dissolved the opposition-controlled par-
liament in March and did not allow fresh
elections until August. In the meantime, he
ran the country without lawmakers to
check him.
In Hong Kong pro-democracy candi-
dates were expected to do well in elections
in September. Citing the risk of covid-19,
the territory’s pro-communist leaders de-
layed them for a year.
Burundi’s election in May was probably
never going to be clean, but the virus sup-
plied the perfect excuse to exclude pesky
foreign observers. Twelve days before the
election they were told that they would
have to quarantine on arrival in the country
for 14 days, thus missing the vote.
In Russia Vladimir Putin has turned the
virus to his advantage. He shifted responsi-
bility for a strict lockdown to regional go-
vernors, but then took credit for easing it.
In the summer he held a constitutional
pseudo-referendum to allow himself to
stay in office until 2036. Citing public
health, he extended the vote to a week and
allowed people to vote at home, in court-
yards, in playgrounds and on tree stumps.
The vote was impossible to observe or veri-
fy. Mr Putin declared a resounding victory.
Parliament voted to change the voting pro-
cedure permanently.
In countries with too few checks and
balances, rules to curb the virus can be
used for other ends. On a dark road in Sene-
gal, a policeman recently stopped a taxi
and detained the driver for wearing his
anti-covid mask on his chin. After 45 min-
utes, shaking with fury, the driver returned
to his vehicle. The cop had threatened him
with dire punishments unless he handed
over some cash, he explained to his pas-
senger, a reporter for The Economist. He
drove off as fast as he could, cursing.
While petty officials abuse the rules to
pad their wages, strongmen typically abuse
them to crush dissent. Police assaulted ci-
vilians in 59 countries and detained them
in 66 for reasons linked to the pandemic.
Violence was most common in countries
Freedom House classifies as “partly free”,
where people are not yet too scared to prot-est, but their rulers would like them to be.
In Zimbabwe, for example, many of the
34 new regulations passed during a nation-
al lockdown are still in place, and have
been used as a pretext for myriad abuses. In
September the Zimbabwe Human Rights
ngoForum, an umbrella group, released a
report listing 920 cases of torture, extraju-
dicial killings, unlawful arrests and as-
saults on citizens by the security services
in the first 180 days of lockdown. One man
was forced to roll around in raw sewage.
Many had dogs set on them. Dozens of op-
position activists have been arrested or
beaten, including a former finance minis-
ter. There were too many everyday cases of
intimidation and harassment to count.
Many strongmen are also chipping
away at pre-pandemic checks on their
power. Nicaragua has borrowed an idea
from Mr Putin: a law will require ngos that
receive foreign funding to register as “for-
eign agents”. India used similar rules toshut down the local arm of Amnesty Inter-
national, which closed in September after
its bank accounts were frozen.
In Kazakhstan trials are taking place on
Zoom, leading some defendants in politi-
cally charged cases to complain that this
makes it easy for judges to have selective
hearing. Alnur Ilyashev, a pro-democracy
campaigner who was sentenced to three
years of restricted movement for “dissemi-
nating false information”, said he could
not always hear his own trial.Nothing spreads like fear
Panic about a contagious disease makes
people irrational and xenophobic. A study
in 2015 by Huggy Rao of Stanford University
and Sunasir Dutta of the University of Min-
nesota found that people were less likely to
favour legalising irregular immigrants if
told about a new strain of flu. Many auto-
crats, even if they have not read the aca-
demic literature, grasp that blaming out-
groups is a good way to win support.Mr Modi’s government tars Muslims as
superspreaders. Bulgaria imposed harsher
lockdowns on Romany neighbourhoods
than on others. Turkey’s religious authori-
ties blame gay people. Malaysian officials
blame migrant workers, some of whom
have been caned and deported.
Minorities have had an especially grim
time in Myanmar. Aung San Suu Kyi, the
country’s de facto president, threatened se-
vere penalties for residents who re-enter
the country illegally. People understood
this to refer to the Rohingyas, a persecuted
Muslim group, roughly 1m of whom have
fled into neighbouring countries. The ru-
mour that Rohingyas were infecting the
nation spread rapidly. A cartoon circulat-
ing online showed a Rohingya man, la-
belled as an “illegal interloper”, crossing
the border, carrying covid-19.
Meanwhile, a unrapporteur warns that
the pandemic has “emboldened” Myan-
mar’s army, which has stepped up its war
on secessionists. The Arakan Army, a rebel
group, offered ceasefires in April, June and
September; all were rebuffed. In May and
June the army bombed civilians, razed vil-
lages and tortured non-combatants, says
Amnesty International. Some 200,000
have fled to camps for displaced people, ac-
cording to a local ngo, the Rakhine Ethnics
Congress. Since covid-19 struck, donations
have declined and supplies of food to the
camps have dwindled.
Abusers and autocrats have not had it all
their own way this year. The pandemic has
drained their treasuries. Their finances
will still be wobbly even when a vaccine is
found and the public-health excuse for
curbs on freedom is no longer plausible.
And people are pushing back. Although
158 countries have imposed restrictions on
demonstrations, big protests have erupted
in at least 90 since the pandemic began. Fu-
rious crowds in Kyrgyzstan this month
forced the government to order a re-run of
a tainted election. Protests in Nigeria
prompted the government to disband a no-
toriously torture-and-murder-prone po-
lice unit on October 11th. Mass rallies in
Belarus have so far failed to reverse a rigged
election there, but have made it clear that
the dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, has
lost the consent of his people.
Institutions are pushing back, too. A
court in Lesotho barred the prime minister
from using the virus as an excuse to close
parliament. Russia’s opposition parties re-
fuse to be cowed even by the poisoning of
their main leader, Alexei Navalny.
With luck, when covid-19 eventually re-
cedes, the global atmosphere of fear will re-
cede with it. People may find the capacity
to care a bit more about abuses that occur
far away, or to people unlike themselves.
They may even elect leaders who speak up
for universal values. But for the time being,
the outlook is grim. 7