Alam Kekal

Prof. Murat however do not consider the above to be sufficient enough and therefore added several of his own -- based on the experiences of his homeland, Turkey. On top of the four abovementioned, he considers a country to be democratic:

1. if the political parties are able to function freely and are not shut down or threatened with being shut down;
2. if the following preconditions of democracy are fulfilled:

• The rule of law must be supreme, entailing equality of all citizens before the law and the obligation of the state to obey the law;
• The state must respect property rights;
• Judiciary must be independent of the executive and legislative branches;
• The legislative should be superior to the executive;
• Basic freedoms (freedom of thought, worship, enterprise, etc.) must be respected by the state;
• The military must be under the authority of the democratically elected civilian government.

Prof. Murat went on to compare the criteria against a number of countries in the world that claims to be democratic.

The glaring breaches and violations of the above criteria by those other countries did not concern me too much as I was busy mirroring them back to my own -- the one that I'm living in right now. That -- concerns me and should concern you too.

In my opinion, not one nation is perfect. I get it. And from time to time, whenever I quoted about anything and that something happens to be on the contrary to what we practice in Malaysia, I would be all too glad to highlight it in red. Just to prove a point.

But.. seriously.. look again at all those criteria above -- both the original four and the ones added by Prof. Murat. Wouldn't it be silly of me to highlight almost all of them in red save for a few?

READ THEM and understand. How democratic are we?

All the things that Prof. Murat pointed out are old news, really. But sometimes I believe that from time to time we need to re-evaluate our thoughts and what we thought we knew and fully understood, which in this case, on how do we view democracy. We can, of course, keep on kidding ourselves with the half-glass full or better little than none rhetoric. But that is not the case when it involves the well being of the people of a nation. We cannot settle for the next best thing to a jungle democracy out there if it means the future of our beloved fatherland. It is imperative that we realize that the criteria are not based on points. There is no 4 out of 10 democracy or the ideal 8 to 10 out of 10 democracy. Anything not 10 of 10 is not a democracy and is not democratic -- for the ones that we missed may have been the ones that are crucial to the overall health of the democracy itself!